The UK won't remain free for long either. The private health industry which has been looking to crack open the UK market for decades has finally got a foot hold with the 2011 Health & Social Care act.

The vast majority of new contracts are going to private providers

and real terms funding is being gradually reduced

OK, but health care costs in the US have been rising faster than the larger economy for 30-35 years. If the ACA had never been enacted, you still would have seen higher premiums and fewer providers year after year, because that was the long term trend. The ACA does not fix the cost growth problem, but it didn't cause it either. Until we can get the cost growth problem under control, every health care system is going to suck.

Course, now I'm stuck worrying about 'conservatives' trying to repeal the ACA, thus removing my coverage - and removing the law preventing new coverage from denying care for my preexisting condition. Elections have become quite literally a life or death matter for me.

Co-pays and coverage are about the same as they were for me. If you buy the absolute bottom tier, you're going to get big co-pays. That's hardly new.

That polygyny is bad for women is not necessarily intuitive. As economist Robert H. Frank has pointed out women in polygynist marriages should have more power because they’re in greater demand, and men should wind up changing more diapers. But historically, polygamy has proved to be yet another setup that screws the XX set. Because there are never enough of them to go around, they wind up being married off younger. Brothers and fathers, realizing how valuable their female relations are, tend to control them more. And, as one would expect, polygynous households foster jealousy and conflict among co-wives. Ethnographic surveys of 69 polygamous cultures “reveals no case where co-wife relations could be described as harmonious,” Henrich writes, with what must be a good dose of understatement.

Children, too, appear to suffer in polygamous cultures. Henrich examines a study comparing 19th-century Mormon households, 45 of them headed by wealthy men, generally with multiple wives, and 45 headed by poorer men, generally with one wife each. What’s surprising is that the children of the poorer men actually fared better, proving more likely to survive to age 15. Granted, this is a small study, but it’s consistent with other studies, including one from Africa showing that the children of monogamous households tend to do better than those from polygynous households in the same communities. Why? Some scholars suspect that polygyny may discourage paternal investment. Men with lots of children and wives are spread too thin, and to make things worse, they’re compiling resources to attract their next wives instead of using it on their existing families.

Must polygamy always bring these social ills? Is it possible to be polygamous in a way that’s good for you and everyone else? Maybe. Historically, problems have cropped up when polygamy is widespread in a culture with great disparities in wealth, and a few men hoard all the women. But it has worked in small cultures where there aren’t a lot of differences in wealth and status. Coontz points to past Native American societies that occasionally engaged in what’s known as sororal polygyny, in which a man married to one woman might also marry her sister, perhaps after the sister’s husband died.