Mark & Juanita wrote:

You do realize that if you don't like one health insurance company,
you are perfectly free to find another, or to lobby your employer to
change insurers -- if enough employees are having problems, your
employer will most likely listen.

It is always amusing to see someone advise people to look elsewhere if they
don't like the way things are now. Where, pray tell, does one find a health
insurance company that doesn't care about pre-existing conditions? Where
does one find an insurance company that hasn't raised its rates far above
inflation in the past 15 years? Where does one go to find an insurance
company that doesn't have 20% administrative overhead?

If you are denied, nothing stops
you from fighting via the legal system or paying yourself -- that may
lead to indebtedness, but if people are willing to go into debt to
get that flat-screen TV or the newest car, you'd think something that
will save their lives would be viewed as a good investment.

Here we go again, Joe and Mary Mainstreet are supposed to sue some giant
corporation with bottomless pockets. Yeah, good luck with that. Hey,
here's a radical idea, how about making it illegal for the insurance
companies to do slimy things like use flimsy excuses to drop customers when
they need treatment? Or does that sound too much like raging communism to
you?

If you
don't like the price, you can shop around -- you'd be surprised the
prices you can get on medical if you pay without insurance -- you
save a lot of paperwork for the doctors. Do you think those options
would be available if the government runs health care? How many
choices do you have for the motor vehicle department?

Please quote those portions of the current health care reform proposals that
would result in "the government runs health care."

And if you don't like the way the DMV works, why not sue the govt.--"
nothing stops you from fighting via the legal system."

i.e, if you can't see the difference between the choices you have now
and a federally mandated, unconstitutional, federally run health
system, there is nothing more that can be discussed.

Since nobody appears to be proposing such a system your continued reference
to it is baffling.

Did you know that survival rates from cancer are the highest in the
United States compared to other countries, especially those with
socialized medicine?

How about for the one-in-six Americans who lack health insurance, what's
their survival rate? The bright point in American health care is
catastrophic medicine like complicated surgery or drug treatment for
diseases like cancer. Unfortunately the other side of that coin is many
millions of Americans can't afford such treatment. Of course if you take
the view that's just their tough luck it makes that grim reality acceptable
(unless you're smart enough to realize that a tenth of *your* health
insurance premiums are used to cover the cost of treating the uninsured).

That is a much better measure of health system
success than life expectancy since that is driven strongly by
genetics and thus demographics in some of those countries that are
very homogeneous compared to the US. As far as infant mortality, you
also have to examine the definitions that other nations use.

Oh, really--so places like Canada and Britain and France and so on have
homogeneous populations? It's hilarious to see various right-wing groups
currently making the claim that life expectancy and infant mortality are
unreliable indicators of how good a nation's health care is. The NCPPR
pushes that line--they're the guys who take contributions from Exxon-Mobil
and then miraculously decide that man-made climate change is a myth. Not to
mention their money-laundering for Jack Abramoff. Yeah, real persuasive
source.

I'd feel a whole lot better if the government were doing a bang-up
job on the health care programs it already runs. VA? Medicare?
Indian Health Service? Not exactly glowing testimonials. But if we
give them the whole sector, they'll make it work. Yeah, I'm
convinced.

VA health care has cleaned up its act in recent years, they're doing a hell
of a lot better job than they did back in the 70s and 80s. They even
negotiated lower prices with the drug companies, something the last
Republican-controlled Congress prohibited Medicare from doing. Besides, you
continue to refer to a total takeover of health care by the govt. when
nothing in the proposed legislation mandates that; how about keeping the
discussion on this planet rather than inventing creeping-socialism horror
stories?