You know what the funniest part of everything in this is? Not one person in the entire system is really doing their "Job". The dynamic of interaction between liberal and conservative viewpoint is really very simple. Liberals are intended to propose NEW laws which are deviations from the established OLD laws, while Conservatives are intended to review those NEW laws and decide if they conflict with the OLD laws, and then through comparison decide if the NEW law is A) not in conflict with existing law(ideally built upon that whole equality of life and freedom deal) and B) a worthwhile expenditure of resources(is the buck worth the bang). So as liberals are intended to propose alterations(change), conservatives are intended to trim down and focus on efficient expenditures(stability). Through this mechanism, at the current point in time, what the liberal mentality is proposing is health coverage for everyone, because in the liberal viewpoint, this is valuable to the happiness and well-being(the social direction). However, the conservative viewpoint is rejecting it based on certain factors- these primarily being cost based(the economic direction).
What we aren't following here is protocol; it's not the job of the Democrat to reduce the cost of a plan, it's the job of the Republican. Not bartering and trading of favors in an emulation of petty currency, but through investigation of available resources and technology to attempt to improve the efficiency of the proposal. When it comes to laws, the same relationship applies; Democrats propose laws based on the benefit to the social direction which is then reviewed for cost-effectiveness by Republicans, and Republicans propose laws based on the benefit to the economic direction which is then reviewed for social impact by Democrats.
The reason for this "not doing their job" is because through the constant in-fighting, the overall perspectives of those interested in becoming politicians has been pushed(in equal opposition) away from the center so far that they no longer can possibly agree without the shameful behavior of exchanging and making deals to pass one law alongside another, even if they are completely irrelevant.
The representatives are no better. Their job is to represent NOT the majority opinion- that's the senator's job, but rather a representative is intended to act as an intermediate voice between the ENTIRE section of the population which they represent and the governmental operation which the representative participates in. This is the reason the purse strings are in the hands of the House in our government.
In fact, the only people that seem to have been trying to do their job have been the Presidents- and on average the system has been so defunct from this inter-party conflict that while they try, they are hardly able to achieve.
The saddest part is that it's everywhere- in Civilians, Consumers, Corporations, Teachers. It's no particular person's fault- nobody has the time, because we're all either busy working at a frenzied pace to occupy ourselves so we get to eat or so the employment numbers look good*, or trying our best to unwind the stress we build from that pace.
And for the ad absurdum and beyond; the reason we all have to work so hard and long in order to just get by is- (drum-roll please?)- because so many people are working and have to be paid a minimum wage, as well as higher-than-minimum wages because it takes specialization to create the finished products, that it has pushed the costs of products so high that you have to work 400 hours at minimum wage to buy something it took 5 people a total of 30 minutes to make at minimum wage. After you add in the cost of every job on the way between base materials and finished product(gathering materials, transporting raw materials, refining raw materials, transporting refined materials, processing refined materials into parts, assembling parts, transporting the product to a warehouse, managing the warehouse, transporting the products to retail outlets, and managing the retail outlets), the cost of every non-mass produced product is 60% supply deficit versus demand, 30% labor costs, and 10% of actual value based on impact to quality of life. For mass-produced products the cost of labor breaks 90% alone- Basically all of the jobs previously listed- but now also including the machine and the power required to run it and the specialist time to design, build, and repair it.
Pretty bad, eh? Most of it's because the money's been bulked up and kept, so there's less circulation- in truth, money itself holds no value over the resources, time, and energy required to produce them; this is because money is intended to represent the tangible value of resources versus supply and demand- as new uses are found, there is more demand and higher costs unless supply catches up, so inflation from supply deficit correlates with population demand, which correlates with technological development of new uses for resources(eg, plastics from oil) as well as available budget trends.
*of course, no idiot in the peanut gallery- that is the pundits; whose job is to point out REALLY bad decisions to prevent them from happening again through sheer embarrassment- realizes that if we really WERE developing as an economic AND social power, LESS people would have to work as technology improves, and not the other way around.