"This is a loud trumpet for all health care reformers. Start over. Get serious about costs. We can either pass this kind of reform and bankrupt the country or we can pass another kind of reform." Too bad Obama and Congress can't hear the trumpet.

Comments

[justcorbly]

The positive influences of a public option would increase in proportion to the amount of business it took from insrunce companies.

I pay about $160 each month for my insurance. My former-employer pays much more. Many people pay much more. What I want is to be allowed to choose my own doctors (some help finding and evaluating doctors would be nice, too). I can't do that now because the costs of going out-of-network are prohibitive. In reality, my insurance company gives me a list of doctors and says, you are free to pick one of them.

I'd like not to be refused treatment my doctor wants to prescribe because some insurance or HMO suit says they won't pay for it. I'd like not to be kicked out of a hospital against my doctor's will because the insurance company or HBO won't pay for it.

I really don't care if the money I pay each month is called a tax or a premium. It's still money. But I don't think the private health care industry is capable of giving me what I want. Or wants to. An industry that rewards people for refusing care to people who need it is not interested in helping people.

[Beelzebubba]

Let's be honest. Can humans ever be more than a resource for government? What possible benefit is there for government to care about its resources when there is always the next human asset willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the ideology of the day. It turns out not to be the ultimate sacrifice because some other ultimate sacrifice will be required after all the previous ultimate sacrifices. Look at the institutions which pay government the most money to get their share of the ultimate sacrifice and look down the list of the recipients who are willing for someone else to make the ultimate sacrifice. Any institution whose agents would squander it most precious resources by exposing them to a foe while underarmed and underarmored and suspend a social compact which is the only protection from the institution, is not interested in helping people either.

[Ed Cone]

Excessive control of a free people is undesirable and at some point a contradiction in terms, but many Americans believe and hope that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.