Cool Translucent Wave: As a nurse, I'd like to say I'll never work for the government.

I guess if we get communist health care I'll just have to work for a plastic surgeon or something. Luckily I know people so I'll never have to wait 6 months for a crucial medical treatment, but I feel bad for the rest of you suckers.

Please refrain from voting until you adequately understand the difference between health care delivery and health care financing. As a citizen, it is your responsibility to educate yourself before utilizing your vote.

Cool Translucent Wave:
Anything that increases bureaucracy and makes it more of a hassle to do my job is a bad thing.

But, to further explain:

Say the citizens of a town have a million dollars budgeted for health care this year. Right now, that money gets spent among insurance, hospitals/doctors, and medications.

Under a government-run health system, that money will STILL need to be spent on insurance, hospitals/doctors, and medications, but there will be a lot less of it, because now there will be a "Department of Health Services" or whatever, that will eat a big chunk out of that budget. This department will need full time employees with benefits, lots of paper and ink, computers, buildings, and, I'm sure, lots of bribes and kickbacks. And its whole job will be to collect all the money from the citizens, and redistribute it to the hospitals, etc.

All this is less money that gets spent on making sick people better.

Cost of Health Care Administration in the United States, New England Journal of Medicine (PDF, pops)

Again, please refrain from voting until you have adequately informed yourself of the issues, the costs, the "bureaucracy," and the fundamental differences between universal health care coverage and socialized medicine.

Thank you.

Mugato: What I don't get is why no one seems to remember that her fixing health care was Bill's biggest platform during his election and they didn't do dick in 8 years.

Although it does seem lately that we do live in a dictatorship, what you don't seem to realize is that the President is not the legislative body as well.

May I refer you to some elementary education in the legislative process:

SchoolHouse Rock - How a bill becomes a law (new window)

The President does not, nor is he/she supposed to, rule by edict. The original Clinton health care plan was killed during the Republican Devolution of 1994. And for further information on your assertion that "dick" wasn't done, as you so crudely put it, SCHIP, State Children's Health Insurance Program, was passed in 1997.

Mugato:
Thank you, oh condescending one, I realize that. But we never even heard about it again. And if they couldn't do it before, people should be at least skeptical that they can do it now, despite the democrat congress, which Bill had too.

First off, the word is Democratic. If you're going to try to make an attempt at any semblance of intelligent discussion, then at least make an attempt at using the English language to its fullest extent. I always found it quite amusing that the party proposing English as the official language of the United States can't seem to grasp simple elementary school rules of the language.

The Clinton proposal was introduced in September 1993, and by November 1994, the Republicans had taken over the House. Surely you'd agree that implementing a complete reform of health care financing structure would take more than a year in order to work out everything in committee, then the House, and then the Senate. These things don't happen overnight, and battling the insurance industry isn't an easy task.

You may not have heard of Hillary Care again, but that does not mean that health care reform arguments and bills simply stopped on the democratic side. Quite the contrary, considering that single payer universal health care coverage bills were subsequently introduced. I, myself, support a single payer plan more than I support the crap hole insurance scheme that Hillary Clinton proposes. While it may end up saving the American people money in the short run, I don't think it is an effective implementation of public policy seeing as it does not seek to limit the existing bureaucracy that exists in the privatized, corporate, for-profit insurance industry.

Without obstructionists who seek to do nothing more than line their own pockets at the expense of the American people, there is no reason why a democratic congress and a democratic president shouldn't be able to reform health care financing. If you want to be skeptical of somebody, look at the Republican party who have had 13 years to reform health care (assuming a democratic president would not veto such legislation) or at least put forth a proposal besides the awful MMA.

Pro Zack: lets see, 110 billion, divided by the number of people in the US...

365

YOU TOO can have insurance for a dollar a day.

Sorry, buddy. The average annual premium for a family of four is $11,500. Average single coverage is $4200. This isn't simple term life insurance. Also, babies and kids don't tend to pay for their own health insurance so you can factor them out of the 300 million people.