what's sought is a 56% increase but the company is negotiating with the state government to settle for now for “only” a 40+ per cent increase.

You' re letting the government do the negotiating on your behalf, how unconservative!!! Don't you believe in the free market and your ability to negotiate face to face with insurance company and get a better deal than those know nothing government bureaucrats?

I've been aware for years with problems with the existing system, but I am not so naive or childish (nor have I lacked the intelligence to know) that if we go from private to public health care (the desire here in the USA among advocates, though they cannot or will not admit or correctly express it, is to extend health care to more people, ideally everyone, provided or paid for and controlled by the federal government) we will exchange one set of problems for another, and there will still be interference by a middleman, so you who need to do it should discard your naivete and lack of realism and understand that before voting for us to “go forward” accordingly.

If you are like me….older and self employed and paying all your own insurance premiums you are screwed!!!

They already are worsh, and already are overreaching and all the rest, rushing to do it, in fact.

But it'll take more of the same for sufficient numbers of others to recognize and respond to it.

* * *

“Then, of course, when such folly slowly begins to erode the quality of American health care”

This will take time, though. The Dems are rushing this health care proposal probably to exploit those who have yet to object to the fiscal misconduct by the Dems in Congress, or before many of them realize it, which they apparently haven't yet, or simply don't care (stereotypical Dim voters).

When there _is_ later dissatisfaction (gee, public care is not magic forever-bliss like the smiling people told us) there will be talk of a “private option” out of or away from the public system under this or that circumstance (to choose one's provider, a right that will all but certainly vanish in the public system sooner or later, or to avoid waiting excessively for public care, which is predictable already), and this “private option” will be attacked savagely by defenders of the public system.

Eventually people who should already know will discover that government _will_ be an intermediary, and substantially interventionist (or interfering).

Right now, in addition to concern about the nonsense the Dems are doing now (while avoiding the crucial cost issue deliberately), the public does support expanded public care, but is concerned about paying for it (and support for it drops when the cost issue is brought to light — out of deliberate Dem darkness).

By the way, here's an article debunking some commonly-held myths about the Canadian health care system.

And here's the sequel to that article.