Imagine if there were several powerful allied special interest groups that all made a bunch of money from healthcare staying expensive.

And they're not just trying to change your mind. They're also working to get the support of the electorate directly.

Now imagine some of those groups had absolutely superb PR. Literally making childhood cancer sufferers healthy again.

Now imagine, like every industry that wants government influence, they hire your friends into highly paid do-nothing jobs, donate generously when you raise money for your charitable foundation, and so on.

Now imagine they're a big employer. And they've got a whole bunch of jobs. Office jobs. Highly paid high-level jobs. Well paid mid-level jobs. Jobs that employ lots of minority groups.

Now imagine that the most efficient outcome would be to shut down all the insurance companies and nationalise all the hospitals, but you don't have the political capital to deliver that, it'd make a lot of people very nervous, and you're not even sure it'd be a moral thing to do anyway. So you'll probably have to settle for a middle ground that keeps a lot of the existing middlemen fat and happy.

Now imagine, even if your reform is a huge success and goes way better than you have any right to expect, people are still going to die in hospitals, and some people are going to say some of them are your fault.

Now imagine turning a blind eye to the problem has been working just fine for the last 20 years. It'd be so easy to just let sleeping dogs lie...