Ok, I’ll give you “most” or an option on “many”.

:)

Freedom is not the same as freedom from consequences.

People are generally free to not pay taxes.

That doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen to them if they don’t (unless they reduce their income below the taxable level, as some do or have no choice but to do).

I’m free to kill someone. Doesn’t mean that if I go stab my husband right now that I won’t face repercussions for the action.

No one would be forcing anyone to pay for healthcare for another person if they didn’t want to. I would always have to choice to find a way to not pay taxes (through legal ways or not…). There just might be consequences. But I’m still free to make the choice for myself.

Being free is not the same as living without consequence.

As for the state of US healthcare, I like many have my own wtf story. I had a cracked filling last Feb, I ignored it because hey, no insurance (couldn’t get my on my husband’s plan until July due to the rules at his work). Abcess developed, so I finally went to the dentist. They put me on antibiotics (90 bucks for those). A few days of taking the antibiotics (a type I’d taken years ago for a different thing), I started to feel horrible. No health insurance, so I ignored it and hoped it was just the curse of the antibiotics. After over a week of debilitating pain, my family convinced me to see a doctor. It was 150 to walk in the door of the dr’s office. She looked at me for 5 minutes, took my blood pressure, and decided that with how I looked and my low bp (I was bleeding out places one shouldn’t bleed out, to put it non-squicky), I needed to go to the hospital.

I refused, but was strong-armed by my husband into it. Long story short, after a battery of tests, a violently horrible reaction to one medication (it had awful side-effects, but because I’m uninsured, they tried this one first since it’s far far cheaper than the other med), and my bp getting down to 80 over 50, they finally put me on a medication that costs 400 per pill. And I had to take 56 of them.

Total bill for my hospital stay plus medication? about 34,000. Oh, and that doctor who saw me for 5 minutes? Billed me for another 390 just to ice the cake. 34k is more than our yearly take-home income after taxes…

This story has a kind of happy ending. I called every department in the hospital that I’d dealt with (the billing office only handled some things, I had to talk to the lab and the pharmacy separately), we got the bill down to just over 6k. This wiped out every penny we had, but we were able to pay it off on a plan over a few months. I know that the hospital had to eat the costs of my stay. I’m just glad they could work with me on it and that I was as persistent as I was (and filled out every bit of paperwork).

That’s my anecdotal “this system needs more options” story. If I hadn’t gone to the hospital (if my husband had let me have my way…) I would have died within a few weeks. If I’d gone to the dentist instead of waiting, I would never had needed the antibiotics that caused the complication in the first place.

At least now I have medical and dental, and the 380 a month it costs seems like a real bargain considering :)

I hope they come up with some sort of plan that works better than the options (or lack of options) that we have now. I’m not exactly holding my breath though. There’s a lot of opposition. I hope you’re right, Scalzi, and Obama is just letting out the rope…

Yeah, it’s a bit long at 5,000 words, but gaawwddammit, I’m fricken tired of laissez faire nutjobs.

From now on, I’m going to point them to this link

California is looking into whether to prosecute these companies or not. The first potentially violates california labor laws. The second may be a violation of business practices laws or something.

20% to 40% are rejected. Corporate death panels.

Half of all bankruptcies in America are from medical bills.

80% of those bankruptcies had insurance.

This is the industry the right wingers are defending, a bunch of greedy suits who can’t keep a contract with their customers or even maintain a minimum of moral decency.

I’ll go you one better. :)
What we have is not a “market”. What we have is a small number of mutually conspiring actors. Conspiring actors: to fix price rigging, to mutually engage in unethical if not illegal practices, to bribe officials in order to avoid investigations, etc.

Couldn’t that rather be considered a criminal cabal? Or even, like the ‘big bankster industry’, a collection of trusts in dire need of busting?

If it is too big to fail, it is too big to allow to survive in its current, dangerous, time bomb form.

So the claim being advanced seems to be that health care is an entitlement.

Who pays? What do you get?

I have direct experience with two government health systems (military care and the VA) and indirect with two others (the Indian Health Service and Medicare.)

I strongly urge everyone at all interested in the actual delivered health care to look closely at the Indian Health Service. The Federal government has had over two hundred years of experience in getting it right. Don’t get sick after June, though, the recipients say.

Um, could you put a quantifier (some, none, all, most, many, few, etc) in front of the word “people”?

I figure I’ll get that clarified before I get too carried away.

Specifically to 479, however, let me detail what my (employer-assisted group) medical insurance gives:

prescription reimbursement
Ambulance charges – especially out-of-province/out-of-country (read: US)
Diabetic supplies
Diagnostics (paying the $25 or so that the labs charge over and above what they ask the province to pay for)
Health care supplies (oxygen+tank, catheter, that sort of thing, outside of hospital, where it’s covered)
Hearing aid
Medical Equipment (braces/casts/splints/walkers/crutches and the like)
Nursing services out of hospital
Orthopaedics
Paramedical supplies (medically-required massage,chiropractic,and such like, and psychologists)
Prosthesis (create and repair)
Vision Care

(also Dental care, but that’s not on-topic).

Note, there’s nothing for GP or specialist costs. That’s because there “aren’t any” (there are some things that aren’t covered, like costs for filling out forms, but frequently the doctor will eat that cost if it’s rare and you can’t pay). Oh, there’s a Hospitalization section. It’s to assist with Physical Rehab services or if you want a semi-private room. That’s it (I think the hospitals sometimes charge for TV, now that I think of it, too).

In other words, not “significantly better coverage” than the “screwed up government system”, but stuff over and above basic care, mostly supplies. And I remind people that even when I had a $120/month “drug habit” (which I didn’t have insurance for, and couldn’t afford), it would have been a $400/month bill in the US. In answer to the “but how would the drug companies make money if everyone had the prices the government rams down their throat?”, I say “well, they choose to sell at those prices. If they thought it was bad business, they wouldn’t. Isn’t that how it works?” and mention that “the free hand of capitalism” includes “if people find the same thing for cheaper, they’re allowed to get it. Oh, sorry, they’re not – the corporations have got the government to call it the ‘grey market’ and make the same sort of outsourcing they do for labour illegal for their customers to do for the fruits of that labour.” Funny, that.

Yes, I’m on the good side of the insurance-through-taxes lottery (on the other hand, I *am* paying a great deal of taxes that I wouldn’t be were I unemployable/dead, my options before hospitalization, over and above my worth to society), but I’m still willing to pay for other people who lose.

And I certainly don’t always do what is in my best interests either which is another of the markets assumptions.