Case in point: My dad lost both kidneys to kidney cancer and needs dialysis three times a week. Do you know how much it costs in the states for one dialysis treatment? $1500. A POP. That is $4500 a WEEK. This is on top of the 10 pills he has to ingest in a given day. My dad has been a hard-working, tax-paying man all his life as a transport driver. My mother is a full time nurse at one hospital and a part time nurse at another. We’re pretty much smack dab in the middle class with some blue around our necks. But if we lived in the states, my mother would be widowed and homeless in less than a year. It would break our family because those medical costs would become unsustainable. Hell, we have problems just getting groceries sometimes.

Yes, there are waits; get a grip, life isn’t an episode of ER. There is ONE doctor working in emerge. Some of those waits are necessary: for transplant waits you must wait two years to ensure that cancer does not reoccur. That measure is in place to make sure a perfectly good organ goes to the best candidate. And generally, surgery goes mighty fast. My dad was taken care of as fast as soon as the paperwork was processed and the appointment rolled around.

Yes we’re in a ton of debt because my dad is off work a lot, but the beauty in this dark cloud is at least we don’t have the stress of hospital bills and expensive treatments/medications. Canadians do have their own insurance plans to cover other things like hospital stays, STD/LTD leave etc.
My point though is that we are enabled to fight for a new normal. I think it’s a shame coverage like ours isn’t available in the States. How can people misuse the system if they aren’t sick? We have issues where expats come back after twenty years, waving the passport around like “I HAVEN’T PAID TAXES IN TWENTY YEARS BUT I NEED EXPENSIVE SURGERY. GIMME.” but that also boils down to: how does one turn away a sick human being? Life should be taken care of.

But it’s those that use the system despite this lack of coverage that are making things so expensive. My husband is a doctor and I could tell you story after story of people who aren’t insured and continually get care and now they system must bear that burden, which is then passed on to those who do pay.

It’s not the insurance companies responsible for this mess…it’s the people who abuse the system or simply take advantage of it!

So don’t give me that line that the conservatives continually block it. Bush raised it!!

The second is that many of the people getting the redistributions aren’t so much needy as members of politically important constituencies — often while truly needy people are still neglected. The motivation isn’t so much helping the less fortunate as securing votes.

The more transparent the proposal, the harder it is to shift benefits from needy people to politically important constituencies.

I’m tired of waiting for the health insurance companies to provide better options.

Seriously, why is someone working at 7-11 or someone who works two 20-hour jobs not worthy of medical insurance while someone sitting on his @$$ at Google worthy of a gold-plated plan? They both serve the public, just in different ways. If somebody is willing to work, no matter how they structure their hours, they ought to have medical coverage available.

If I could change one thing in my past, I would have bought a basic medical insurance and disability plan when I was 20 and perfect weight for my height. But I didn’t know any better and just took the company plans that were offered. When I wanted to run a consulting practice so that I could have more flexible work hours, I couldn’t qualify. I have had to piece together coverage and finally went back to the corporate world and full-time work two years ago to get a decent plan.

I work for a tiny company (under 10 people), and I had no choice of plan. They also don’t provide any dependent coverage, and since it’s not headquartered in CA, we couldn’t even buy domestic partner coverage out of our pocket.

2. Hello, have you noticed that Democrats get a couple of bucks from unions? And, that unions stand to gain enormously from “health care reform”? That’s just for starters.

3. We’ve had a welfare state for eighty-odd years, but with Obama we’ll finally start seeing solutions that help rather than hurt? In a few years? Isn’t it about time for that?

The problem is that “reform” is offered as an improvement in efficiency, when the real purposes are to 1) redistribute income to people via health coverage, and 2) fund those redistributions by capturing the large inefficiencies in the current system.

Why not do this on separate tracks? Do a set of reforms to address the serious cost/quality problems. Do another set for the truly sticky problems, such as moral hazard and the risky clients. And do a program to extend subsidy support for those that truly can’t pay for themselves.

Answer? Because the Democrats and their constituencies want more redistribution than would be politically supported in a transparent process. So they want a big, jargony, complicated reform, one where everyone needs several days’ study just to know what the hell they’re talking about. They want to talk about some serious but fixable problems, and some marginal but important and really tricky problems, because peopel really care about those. And they’re using them to justify a huge program that sort of helps with the real problems, while taking huge steps toward their redistribution agenda. They’ve got a serious leak in the kitchen, and rather than fix that they want to rip out and reinstall all the plumbing in the house so they can add another bathroom and have it look small in the midst of all the fuss.

It’s not that I object to helping people. I object to deliberately hiding the extent and manner of it, to deliberately complicating the discussion and exaggerating the connections among problems to advance an agenda. I object to construing moral deficiencies in objections that are essentially technical. I’ve got no problem with you, Jon, or the things you want. But you are giving these people in Congress far more credit than they deserve. That has always come back to bite the trusting.