whoooooosh

My contention is *NOT* that those 46 million people don't deserve coverage. My contention is that I don't see how those 46 million people can be provided health care coverage without increasing the current costs paid for healthcare.

Assuming the US population at 300M and 46M people without health care coverage, that means the current amount paid is covering 254M people. I don't see how we bring that number up to the whole 300M people without increasing the overall cost or reducing the level of service.

WOOOSH!

Oh, "employed hobos living under the docks" seems to be any oxymoron.

Unless of course you meant to say "employed homos living under docks." Is this a gay rights issue?

Again, I believe the concept is that by providing regular health care for those additional people as well as the people at the bottom of the insured ranks we can mitigate the more extreme costs they generate when they get really sick or visit the ER for something that could have been cheaply dealt with if found sooner. I'm not suggesting that this will magically cause the plan to work, but it's not entirely unfeasible, and providing regular health care for those people won't necessarily add a masive burden.

I've finally learned to skip the articles written by "fear the reaper" and go straight to the comment page. Now I can use the headline to search for the story on yahoo.

It's not just that. We'll also have a pretty incredible savings if we reduce the crazy amount of paper work that is currently demanded by our system. Right now we've got trails of paperwork and accounting and auditing and so forth between all of these groups:



Each of those lines costs money and it's mostly a cost that gets past down to the insurance consumer.

With a single payer system it looks more like this:



Of course that's pretty idealized, there is always room for corruption, incompetence and petty politicking to ruin an otherwise good idea.


Here's a random article that explains in a little more depth

Hi everybody! My name is Michael and I live in a wacky country called Canada. Yes it is a cold country from November to March. We dont put people in jail for smoking marijuana or for commiting homosexual acts of pleasure. Here in Canada we also have free health care! If you are curious how it works you should come up here, (or down here if you live in Alaska) smoke a joint, get a blow job from a gay man and walk into a free hospital!

Sincerly,
Your 'Crazy Canuk 'Friend,
Michael

I'm a Brit, our National Heath Service is a giant lumbering beast of a bureaucratic mess. It has issues. Plenty of issues. It costs a fortune (we're talking £96 billion ($187 billion) a year here people). But I'm damn happy and proud that my taxes pay for it. Because I know it's there if and when I should need it, and in the mean time that money is helping other people. From my point of view, I'd rather my money is being used to help other people or even being wasted completely due to incompetence / bureaucracy in the massive NHS system, than paying out monthly to an insurance company. By it's nature a company's primary goal is to earn profit for it's shareholders. Not help people. Who knows what your money is being invested in whilst your paying up, waiting to get ill? Now I know, some of that money is paying other peoples medical bills, but that is not it's primary function now, is it? Or perhaps I've misunderstood how these companies work?

On another British note: Brits love sarcasm. More news should be reported this way.

Sarcasm is fun. I loled the minute I saw the communism bit.

Yeah, because SG news is normally sooooooooooo unbiased.

And America could survive just fine without socialist programs. We did so for quite some time.

BTW, the article was sarcastic.

My god.... THINK about it..... if Communism infects our government..... it may soon infect our Video games too....

Look its already started!

What's the weather like in Bizarro World?

BIZARROOO!!!

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!