Any place that Rasheed Wallace graduates from cant be too great.

Well, what can I say? I'm a glutton for punishment. :o

History of health insurance in the US (and stuff on Canada, too):

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_...rance.html#s49

Medical malpractice suits are a very small fraction of the reason health care is expensive- blaming them is just FOX propaganda to distract from real reasons and to blame something on lawyers, who are generally perceived to support Democratic candidates. Not saying there aren't frivolous lawsuits, but they are about as big a part of the health cost pie as the NEA is to your taxes (another favorite FOX target). If we really wanted to do something about medical malpractice, it would be better to lean on the AMA to police incompetent doctors, since a small number of doctors account for a sizable percentage of medical error.

The insurance industry is a huge chunk of the cost- insurance companies make their money by not providing service. In what other industry is this considered normal?

Mind you, disaster insurance, etc., makes sense- you pay a small amount of money every year as protection against something that is not likely to happen, but if it does, will cost you a lot of $$. So, a lot of people pay a small amount of $$, and a few of them wind up getting a lot of $$ in the event of disaster. Company makes money, and no one feels a real pinch.

But health care is different- everyone is going to need it at some point in their lives. And you can yell about personal responsibility, and laziness, and blah blah blah, but at the end of it all you've still got a sick human being suffering and in pain. Just like you can yell about lazy poor people but in the end you've still got someone going hungry and/or sleeping in the street.

Yes, some kind of universal coverage would raise taxes. It would also cut the cost of producing steel by 20 percent, because the businesses would not have to provide health care. So it could also bring jobs back to the US and make us competitive in manufacturing, etc. again. Is that preferable to higher taxes? Maybe, maybe not.

One could ask, would a long wait to see a doctor encourage people to take better preventative care of themselves, because they know they'll have to fork out $$ from their own pocket to see a private doctor? Isn't that encouraging true individual responsibility and really motivating people to take care of themselves? Maybe, maybe not. I do find it interesting that Cuba's life expectancy is almost the same as the US's, with a much lower standard of living. They speculate it's because due to not having a surplus of food, and few people being able to afford cars, Cubans, while not starving, can't overeat, and since they have to walk and bicycle, stay fit. I'm not advocating it (duh; I like a stocked shelf as much as the next person); it's just interesting that, with all the $$ we spend, we're not living any longer or healthier than an embargoed, poverty-stricken nation is.

I don't know the answer. I wonder if we'd be best served by some kind of gov't program that offers basic maintenance care, taking that out of the private insurance equation, and giving people the option of purchasing their own insurance for catastrophic health events. Americans tend to think in absolutes (one of the reasons, I'm convinced C2 failed), but there is usually more than a simple capitalism vs. socialism option.

Social Security, by the way, is one of the most successful social programs ever instituted- virtually eliminated elderly poverty. And it's very, very efficient. Needs to have the retirement age raised, of course, and the discriminatory cap on earnings lifted, but for all the wailing that it's running into financial trouble, the amount we've wasted in Iraq would have kept it solvent for 2 centuries, and yet somehow the gov't found the $1 trillion for a war of choice.

(On a grumpy note, I find it amusing that a person who owns her own horse and doesn't have to work a job while in college talks about having no money. Perspective, please. :) )

Danzig, if you really want to be taking no help from anyone, move to Rhode Island. As it is, Arkansas (you're from Arkansas, right?) gets $1.41 in federal aid for every $1.00 paid in taxes. (In NY, we get $0.79 back for every $1.00 we pay in, so in a way, one could say you're living off of me. ;)) Rhode Island is a pretty even $1.00 to $1.00 match. I'm teasing you, as I do believe richer states should help poorer ones, but it's always funny to hear the self-sufficiency argument coming from states who get more back from the government than they put in.

All that said, I'm probably going to end up voting for the magical unity pony, as I'm angry at HRC for not voting on the FISA thing today. Though I do think she's been getting an unfair deal in the media, I base my vote on candidates' actions, and she should have been there for that vote. And Harry Reid is a scumbag.

If you want to understand why health care costs as much as it does, you can do a LOT better than MSN Encarta. That stuff is written literally at a 3rd grade comprehension level.

Try www.kaiser.org or, better yet, type into google something like "Harvard School of Economics White Papers Cost of Health Care." You will find what you are looking for if you want to understand the issue very well.

You will learn who the stakeholders in the current system are and what movement it will take from all of them to change the way health care is delivered and financed.

You will learn that one of the biggest reasons HC costs so much more in the US is because this is where most innovation and the resulting technologies talkes place.

If you don't care to really understand the issue, all you will have is a TV sound bite education on Health Care, i.e., evil insurance companies, predatory malpractice lawyers, etc....

thats what i say. i kind of like obama. who can do worse than we already got ?i also like ron paul but the republicans are still stupid and don't realize that the party has been hijacked. they should of given ron paul a chance. hes the real deal. 100 years of war and borrowing from china, yeah, macain that will win you tons of votes. i can't see him winning against anyone.

You gotta change that name,man.