What Americans want is a health care system that costs less provides more and doesn’t require them to make any sacrifices. That is a dream.

I want a health care system that is not going to make CEO’s and stockholders rich. I also don’t want to go bankrupt from having a serious illness, is this too much to ask for?

England and Canada have much higher tax rates and patients can wait for months for procedures.

They get more for their money. Your second statement is not based on any real facts. It is a typical scare tactic used by those who oppose doing away with our arcane system. I use to live in Great Britain and never had to wait to see a doctor. Our doctor made house calls at any hour of the night.

My ex’s mother had a rare liver disease; if she had been in this country she would have been denied coverage and would have died due to her preexisting condition. Her only delay was the time to took to find a liver that matched. She passed away recently but her life was a full one and had she not received the transplant she would have died 18 years ago.

French hospital workers, doctors and nurses have all gone on strike in the last 3 years.

The French still are the most satisfied people of any of the industrial nations with their health care system which is one of the best in the world even with the strikes. Go figure.

In the past 3 years how many people have been denied care by their insurance companies?

In the past 3 years how many people have filed for bankruptcy due to medical bills?

In the past 3 years how many people have lost their jobs and coverage?

In the past 3 years how many people how many people have been ripped off by the health insurance companies that take their money but have such huge deductibles that it makes the insurance worthless?

In the past 3 years how many senior citizens have to choose between medication and eating?

In the past 3 years how many people have to wait months to see a specialist? Then be denied the care the specialist prescribes.

In the past 3 years how many people how many people are denied coverage after they are found to have a serious illness such as cancer. The most common way this is done is the insurance companies look at every document you ever made out to prove you lied about that cancer.
Or they will deny treatment by calling it “experimental”.

In the past 3 years how many people can say they are satisfied with this market-based system?

I want a health care system that is not going to make CEO’s and stockholders rich. I also don’t want to go bankrupt from having a serious illness, is too much to ask for?

England and Canada have much higher tax rates and patients can wait for months for procedures.

They get more their money. Your second statement is not based on any real facts. It is a typical scare tactic used by those who oppose doing away with our arcane system. I use to live in Great Britain and never had to wait at all to see a doctor. Our doctor made house calls at any hour of the night.

My ex’s mother in law had a rare liver disease; if she had been in this country she would have been denied coverage and would have died. Her only delay was the time to took to find a liver that matched. She passed away recently but her life was a full one and had she not received the transplant she would have died 18 years ago.

French hospital workers, doctors and nurses have all gone on strike in the last 3 years.

The French still are the most satisfied people of any of the industrial nations with their health care system which is one of the best in the world even with the strikes. Go figure.

In the past 3 years how many people have been denied care by their insurance companies?

In the past 3 years how many people have filed for bankruptcy due to medical bills?

In the past 3 years how many people have lost their jobs and coverage?

In the past 3 years how many people how many people have been ripped off by the health insurance companies that take their money but have such huge deductibles that it makes the insurance worthless?

In the past 3 years how many senior citizens have to choose between medication and eating?

In the past 3 years how many people have to wait months to see a specialist? Then be denied the care the specialist prescribes.

In the past 3 years how many people how many people are denied coverage after they are found to have a serious illness such as cancer. The most common way this is done is the insurance companies look at every document you ever made out to prove you lied about that cancer.
Or they will deny treatment by calling it “experimental”.

In the past 3 years how many people can say they are satisfied with this market-based system?

The caller who put her faith in “trickle down economics” was a howl. Despite GOP propaganda, not even the Cato Institute could prove that any has made it all the way down. We need to move to “spending up economic.” When the poor, disabled & elderly have extra $$ to pay for food, Rx drugs, MS appts, rent & other necessities. The Wall ST bonuses will just recycle as more insider “investments.”

We need Universal Single Payer [Enhanced Medicare for All] so that we aren’t spending $1 T more than we nned. There are also public health reasons that USP can address that are not in our current “anti-system” insurance giveaways.

It’s time to stop business as usual on Wall ST & in the Hartford insurance cabal. Let Congress & POTUS know that is NOT ACCEPTABLE!

They also got $16 billion from the government rescue of AIG

Never, ever tell me again that the free market is efficient, attractive or desirable.

England and Canada have much higher tax rates and patients can wait for months for procedures.

French hospital workers, doctors and nurses have all gone on strike in the last 3 years.

Got to love America, where a failed judicial candidate is the point person on attacking a candidate for the highest court, by condemning her speeches, not her judicial decisions. This ‘reality’ is truly a situation the late Robert Altman would have loved to skewer!

Interesting, so we should pay more than $4000+ a year to get the other knee covered. Give me a break. This is your solution to health care, people should just pay more premiums. That’s a pile of cow dung. The insurance industry is only interested in profits, they spend close to 50% of what we pay in premiums on executive compensation advertising and the shareholders. We the costumers are not considered at all. Unless it’s to drop us to save the bottom line.

I have lived in Great Britain and I had no problems with the national health care system they have there. Compared to what the French have it’s not as good. Compared to what I have here it’s a gold standard.

Our market-based system is broken. Name one country that has copied or is planning on using our market based system as a model. You can’t find any because our system is so absurd.

More than 70% of Americans want real reform, real reform means a public option. If Obama and the democrat’s can’t deliver this they will be voted out of office and he will have one term. Of course that means we go back to the republican party which is the party of “NO”. Things will get worse, maybe by then I’ll learn French well enough to emigrate.

The congressional bill is clearly a sell out.
This is not democracy at work, it’s special interest.

Pharma getting what they want
-50 Million new insurance customers (forced by law).
-Four years for insurance and pharma to have their paid-for congress disembowel the bill, piece by piece, quietly. (And four more years of people dying)
-Income contingent ‘Public Option’, with doctors free not to accept those patients. (AMA’s very happy about that one)

$4,000 per year is nothing. If you were paying more, maybe the other knee would be covered. If we all paid more, more would be covered. Rationing healthcare is the only way to control health costs. Eliminate insurance cos. and it’ll be the gov. that does it. You need to think more than one move ahead. Non-profit, what a joke! I work for a not-for-profit (a c4), all that means is that we have a charitable purpose and pay out all we take in. Our salaries are completely in-line with the private sector. You’ll save very little going non-profit and you risk taking incentive away to innovate and attract the best and brightest.

Taxing those who make more than $350K is only the beginning, expect this level to come down significantly.

Looks like nobody wants to think about "inconvenient" topics. Or, we are brain-lazy.

I keep hearing this nonsense about how do we pay for it.

Well I’m paying for it now. We, my wife and I, pay over $4000 per year for health insurance. HMO Blue rations our health care all the time. They recently informed my wife that they only cover one knee when she needed physical therapy. Not only that they also informed her that of the twelve sessions that the doctor prescribed they would only co-pay for eight.

Most Americans are paying through the nose for insurance that does not pay for health care. We are paying the insurance companies who in turn are dictating how we get health care. It’s obvious to me that they need to be taken out of the picture, period. We pay billions into a dysfunctional system that already rations health care.

Take the money we all pay put it into a non-profit health care system. Seems pretty simple too me.

All the rest of the chatter is just that, chatter and BS.
It’s all a smoke screen to keep the insurance corporations in the game.

Rather then taxing people who make more than $350k get rid of the insurance corporations instead.

On health care, nothing less than single payer will do.
Unless we take the profit margin of the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations out of the picture noting is going to change. Obama’s plan and the house bill are nothing mere band-aids. They are not dealing with the real issue, the INSURANCE CORPORATIONS!

Feel better Nicholas.

NYT 7/16:
“The vice chairman of the panel, which has 10 members, will be Bill Thomas, the former Republican representative from California who led the Ways and Means Committee, who was selected by Republican leaders.”

1. What trickles down from the very well-to-do can be a meagre as a small leak from a sewer pipe. This is not to say that categorically all people of wealth are as nasty as sewage– far from it, but the idea of trickle-down is about as welcome as the trickle from a sewer pipe leak.

2. A few decades ago, the authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg were on a book tour; their book, based iirc on multi-millennial knowledge of history, predicted a real horror of a world-wide depression. There are those who say that we have kicked the economic can down the road for about five years or so, and are headed for much worse trouble. Let’s hope this is not to be our future.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to read several comments and see that spelling in them (such as “then” for “than” and vice versa) is consensus-misspelling, a fork in our written language that is coming to amount to a nascent dialect.