I've noticed the same thing for ages. Doctors routinely don't accept Medicare (also Medicaid) patients. They are underpaid, for one major reason. (In fact, some providers actually lose money treating Medicare patients.) They recover at least some money by charging privately-insured and other patients additionally.

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“Obama is setting himself up to be a one-hit wonder by his emulating another one-hit wonder.”

People gave Bush the Elder the benefit of the doubt on his “no new taxes” pledge. That he broke his word was a, if not the, major reason he was not re-elected in 1992. At least among those of us who can think (as well as remember), Obama never fooled us from the start. And it's no surprise that his deeds don't match his words (as is true with running General Motors and directing Chrysler, too). What can be remarkable is actually what he does (and how much his deeds diverge from his words).

He's telling us right now with a straight face that a “public option” incrementalist move is not leading to a broader provision of health care later. Ha.

I have personally interacted with thousands of physicians in the past 20 years and I can assure you 97% do not gladly accept Medicare, many do so grudgingly or out of a sense of responsibility.

That page is HERE. For more surprising details, all referenced, check out THIS site. The pdf file seems to be broken, but the powerpoint contains much of the illuminating detail.

What is your source for that? Your numbers are way off from everywhere else I've read.

Now we've got the next Pappy Bush in office:
“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

Pappy Bush breaking his tax promise is infamous to this day and it played a role in not only having a third party challenger enter the Presidential race, but in having Clinton defeat Pappy Bush. Obama is setting himself up to be a one-hit wonder by his emulating another one-hit wonder.

It is a vast _increase_ in federal expenditures, and thus in a need for more taxes or borrowing. That is more important than (largely claimed, not achieved) cost reduction (actually, cost _growth_ reduction).

Assuming we aren't going to continue the Obama tradition of dwarfing Bush's debt in addition to deficits, how will we pay for the vast _increase_ in federal expenditures to provide “optional” (for now) health care?

Federal health care never has been nor will be a magic solution. Costs will grow, though in theory not as much. There will still be middlemen in an all-federal (say, all-Medicare with VA folded into Medicare along with Medicaid and Indian and other related services, the simplest and best model I envision) health care system, just in government rather than the private sector. There will be bureaucracy and it will be much worse than advocates ever will admit, or probably more than most of them ever have conceived. Even if it is centralized and made totally federal, there will be large bureaucracy. Rather than cynical financial motives as a major complaint, we'll see politicization of and political interference with medicine as a huge problem. (We already see this starting to happen with General Motors and plant closure redecisions and more to come with Congressional as well as executive branch interference with company operations!) And costs will be a problem and will be limited through rationing, not only to control costs but also as a tool to embody and enforce political considerations and goals and values. (It is not inconceivable someday for transplants to be limited, or to be no longer provided in some cases, say to liver patients in order that many more, often younger-with-greater-potential-remaining-lifetimes-as-taxpayers alcoholics get treatment instead. A harsh but completely realistic example of not merely ethics, but politics in action.)
I needn't go on — it's not the magic solution people think, and there won't be instant cost savings. (Especially not if the Constitution is honored if we convert forcibly from private to public health care, in which case 20-30+ years' profits are due the private owners as legitimate compensation for taking of property, for example, something deliberately refused in the unconstitutional Conyers Medicare bill — I wonder what moral shortcuts many are willing to take with public health care, even more than with General Motors and Chrysler bondholders…)

The “public option” is the camel's nose, head, and front quarters in the tent, as I have already said elsewhere. The question is, how much more gets into the tent, and how soon.

I wonder if they believe in elevated, progressive income and wealth taxes as well as in a new federal value-added tax, like the one that is being resurrected from the early Clinton years already once more here, in the minds of those who are thinking about how to pay for all this magic.

Note the irony here (or the hypocrisy, actually). Many want to provide health care to those who don't have health insurance, and even go so far as to want gold-plated super-sized health care that includes all kind of preventive care, which so many people who already have it don't bother to use it. Yet on the other hand, the obvious tax grab in the works on employee health benefits (that exceed a certain value; talk is of $15,000 annually) has been rationalized by an argument that may conceal envy or class-warfare resentment, but actually provides an example of what critics of government health care have correctly been warning people about all along: The rationale is that the good-quality benefits “encourage excessive use of health care services.” So as an incentive to these people to get _less_ health care, that is why the health care benefits “should” be taxed. I'm (almost) disappointed that these people haven't said that they need to reduce the benefits of those who have too much, to give them to those who don't have enough, in one and the same sentence — and follow it by saying they will review “overuse” and “costly duplication” and “appropriate” health care services (and the rationing of those permitted) in the future.

Apparently the size of the ignorant or careless horde that forms so much of the Dem voter base right now is so large and their ignorance or carelessness is so great that Obama is confident enough to proceed on health care even before the economy (and federal finance) has recovered. He's in full campaign mode now and it's disturbing as well as disgusting when one stops to consider it how cynically the public opinion among these easy-to-fool-and-lead people is being deliberately manipulated, enhanced by Obama's celebrity appeal and personality cult among these people. A horde of people doesn't care!

(Note: They're the true low-rent resentment crowd, to correctly apply someone else's misdirected term elsewhere on this site.)

Since I don't have employer paid health care, I'm already subsidizing the whiners who do.

The soon-to-be-delivered estimate on Democratic healthcare reform proposals is expected to be so expensive that lawmakers are talking about changing the chamber’s normal accounting procedures.

Heh, you gotta love Washington.

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