Dear Canadian Natalie-Ann,
Down here in the United States we have this document called "The United States Constitution" which helped a group of backwoods farmers create the most powerful country on the planet in less than 200 years. This document is based on maximum freedom, maximum liberty, and minimal government interference in the lives of its citizens.
For over a 100 years progressives have worked tirelessly to minimize our freedom and liberty and to increase the power of the government. Unfortunately for them, a slight majority of Americans know that the government is the problem not the solution.
See the thirteen colonies got together and created our federal government. In so doing, they granted said government with a few (what we call "enumerated") powers. Most of them had to do with foreign affairs and the military. Beyond those few powers, the states were free to do whatever the hell they wanted including offer healthcare to their citizens.
The beauty of this is, if your state is taken over by a bunch of whack-jobs who are hell-bent on bankrupting the state by buying votes through wealth transfers schemes (see California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts) you could move to another state. However, if the federal government starts messing around in areas of the economy or in social issues in which they have no power, most Americans cannot afford to leave the country.
In a nutshell, most Americans do NOT want to end up like you Canadians or like the western European quasi-socialistic nations that attempt to pander to every malcontent demanding free shit from the government. Nope! Most Americans (or at least the 60 million that voted for that dastardly man named Trump) believe in self-reliance, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, ending government interference in every aspect of our economy (i.e. healthcare) and allowing the free markets go to work. Then when a little boy in Albuquerque needs open heart surgery or an elderly man in Nebraska needs heart medication, their respective health insurance policies - one that they or their family purchased in the free market, across states lines; one that meets their individual needs; one that they owned and paid on for many years; one that was not tied to an employer - might actually cover some or all of those expenses.
