Obviously, that does not imply we should rush childishly and stupidly to compound the situation and introduce the substantial risk of making it worse rather than better.

It's just a question of whether you prefer to have the money taken out at the front end or prefer to take it out yourself at the back end. Either way, you're paying for it.

Maybe that emphasis will help?

It comes out of your paycheck in the form of taxes. Just like your insurance policy premium — which is higher this year than it was last year and will be even higher next year than it is this year because of millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans who get their preventive medical care in hospital emergency rooms — comes out of your checking account. Or your savings account.

It's just a question of whether you prefer to have the money taken out at the front end or prefer to take it out yourself at the back end.

Not to mention that when you compare the amount of taxes that they pay to support such a system to the amount of money the average U.S. citizen pays for insurance, we pay substantially MORE for LESS. I have no idea why people harp on higher taxes to pay for a service that would actually lower the amount of money they'd pay out of pocket in the end. Sure it would lower my taxes to not have the government supply me with police protection, but it'd be a heck of a lot more expensive for me to have to hire my own personal bodyguards. Still, I'm not barred from hiring bodyguards in addition to accepting police protection (or refusing it) should I wish to do so.

As per the “maintenance and preventative care” issue… It's a heck of a lot cheaper to pay for regular oil changes than to replace an engine. Same goes with human maintenance.

It's safe to argue that no country has found a perfect solution to health care. However, with so many other countries offering some form of socialized health care and with those countries showing lower expenses and better quality of care for those under it, I'd say that we can at the very least copy and paste to find a BETTER (not perfect) way to do things in the U.S.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel, folks, and when the other cart moves faster, it's hard to argue that it won't at the very least improve the ease of moving your own. It may not go as fast as you want it, but it's going faster than you are by just dragging a cart with no wheels at all.

Of course, in a socialized system, you can't switch to a different system of care, while with prepaid you can. But if you don't get lousy treatment from your system of care until you already have a serious condition, competitors are likely to turn you down, which is perfectly understandable, as you point out.

Still, I can't really argue with the claim that prepaid health care might be a step forward in many cases.

Let's make it easier for you to advance your illogical assertion—-let's hear from any liberal who paid their premiums are were “cancelled”……for any reason.

And if you're making your punt off of Rambie's story, have him upload a copy of the insurance policy wording that had a pre-existing conditions exclusion that lasted for 10 years……….I'd love to have a copy of an insurance policy that was illegal but was approved by the state insurance department as approved for sale in that state.

Could this be because the fat and happy (and disease free) are content to talk about the subtleties of Health Insurance vs Health Care because they have no experience with personal health vs corporate greed? Health Insurance is an economic issue. Health care is a life and death issue.

Actuary tables have meaning only to those who have been lucky enough to stay healthy or are still young. They see insurance as an expense that can be minimized by living correctly. I suspect your politics will change in direct relation to your health. Conservatives have shown they are proud of their lack of empathy; there will be hell to pay for your lack of comprehension.

Maybe we could take a year off from blowing up sh*t in the Middle East and pay for health care for the next 10 years?

That's not the only reason why we're seeing the push now, particularly this very-defective effort by the Dems ironically at a time of economic slump and “need” to stimulate the economy (which implies the avoidance of anything new that is especially costly, new entitlements as well as new and more taxes).

The desire for reform isn't going to go away if the Dems rightly grow up and slow down this and next year.

1. Many of us have insurance (pre-paid health care) that is not group insurance provided by employers.

2. You will notice that _nobody_ is denying there is frequent misconduct by the insurance companies.

3. What you are describing is related to a subset of health care that has been neglected for some time by the Dems in their push to have Washington take over more health care elsewhere, to supply other, new, groups of beneficaries instead: long-term care. Long-term care (actually, late-life and end-of-life care) of the elderly is a long-neglected problem (complete with the “Medicaid trap,” which Washington has acted on to increase, not reduce, with its “[private] asset recovery” effort recently), but which will grow in time as our population ages — and which provides us with a warning now of the future insofar as cost growth and need to control it inevitably becomes a worse problem, means-testing and “asset recovery” for all kinds of government health care in addition to rationing on the basic of “futility” as well as “appropriateness” and mere political preferences (rehab for many vs. liver transplants for few, etc.).

Actually, that has long been known and anticipated as the end of insurance and the beginning of truly-population-wide support for and insistence on government health care; it simply hasn't arrived yet and won't for years to come, longer than the most interested people have always believed.

So do you know what happens when health insurance providers deny coverage to cancer patients (or worse, cancel coverage for long-time customers to avoid footing the bill)? To get helth care, the patient has to quit his or her job and stop contributing to the economy to be broke enough to qualify for Medicaid.

It doesn't seem to me that forcing people to go on Medicaid is an improvement to balancing those costs out across an entire system of patients. That's traditionally what insurance is about. And yes, insurers generally use actuarial tables to assess individualized costs — but even then, there are laws about things they can't do.

For example, even if an insurance company decides that black people are a greater life insurance risk than white people, it's against the law for them to jack up rates for any black person who wants life insurance just because they're black. Now maybe you think that ought to be perfectly acceptable. For that matter, maybe you think it's perfectly acceptable to discriminate against women in the workplace on the grounds that there's a higher actuarial risk that they will quit later to have babies. But most Americans think that there are limits to what companies ought to be able to do with actuarial tables, hence the laws we have in place. If pre-existing conditions become another area of regulation, it will simply fall into this tradition.

The real economic problems with health care, boil down to a few simple problems without simple answers: (1) Reimbursement for medical providers based on price per line item performed leads to overtreatment, with unnecessary tests, procedures, etc. (2) Giving people access to health care without attaching a proportionate cost per treatment to the patient (whether through a great medical plan or socialized medicine) leads to overuse of services by patients. (3) Not giving people access to affordable, timely health care is expensive (in emergency care costs, etc.), but those costs are externalities that do not fall proportionately on the stakeholders. (4) Few people can stomach letting people die for the sake of saving money, but the costs of end-of-life care are enormous and growing. (5) The risk of malpractice suits leads to overtreatment for CYA purposes.

The current proposal addresses at best two of these, but completely fails to incentivize providers to offer only treatments that are really necessary (the most important issue of all), and also fails to tackle end-of-life care or tort reform. Until health care providers themselves have reasons to look for ways to save money while retaining quality of care, no health care reform will ever be successful.

No, we are not. We are simply being honest, for a change, about what a “safety net” is; as for the problem of neglect (deferring maintenance), that is an individual decision, which, incidentally, far from everyone is hopelessly unable to think about and act on without parental direction from government.

It won't be free but other countries have demonstrated that it can work without bankrupting the coffers or sliding the population into communism.

And speaking of comprehensive health care, government health care as the ideal, and liberal hypocrisy:

Why is the term “Medigap” so familiar to everybody?

To recover actual costs arising from their use is one thing, but in reality liberal politicians, pushed by childish, ignorant, and often dishonest activists, will insist on much higher taxes than are ever merited.

That's in addition to dishonestly referring to health care provision as “insurance” [sic] and appealing to the exploitable by charging them “premiums” [sic] that are only a fraction of the total costs that are incurred.

You know, like the current defect in Medicare, whose “premiums” remain only about 25 per cent of costs, the rest coming out of general revenues.

(The “magic solution” to this by liberals will be to insist on all funding being “mandatory” out of general revenue. They really will believe that this “solves” the problem immediately and forever! Oh, and that it appeals to the kind of people who want something “magically” for “free” is no doubt in large part why it is part of the Conyers “Medicare for All” legislation. The revenues “should” be raised through progressive income and wealth taxation, as well as taxes on things like stock and bond transactions, predictably.)