General Discussion

Because they were zoned for one of the worst public schools in Washington DC, and no amount of work that my then-wife and I would have done could have made a damned bit of difference. We're both products of public schools, I'm a huge supporter of public schools, but there was no way I was going to sacrifice my daughters' educations to that, period. By the time we moved to a good district, both kids had been in the school for 6 years, and we weren't about to pull them out and away from all of their friends. It was a huge sacrifice financially, but one that I would do again in a heartbeat, given the same circumstances.

And I can't speak to how education funding works in Canada, but in Fairfax county Virginia, property taxes go to the schools, whether you have kids there or not. The public schools lost out on the federal per pupil spending, but they didn't lose a dime in county funding, and in fact received state sales tax fundiing for my kids even though they weren't in public schools. I'm fine with that, in fact glad for that. But the fact is, Fairfax County was better off with my kids not being in school, because the per pupil spending is much greater than any loss of federal funding.

As I said in another post to you, I would agree with you 100% on the single payer/insurance issue if it were a matter of insured people jumping to the head of the line. But if there is a separate line, then that doesn't happen, and in fact, the single payer users move up faster because there are fewer people in the line.

As you said, YMMV.