“Save” health care first, then take a ski vacation to congratulate each other. Have fun in Vail, Demmies.

If you can't walk the walk, ski the slopes.

Their beef is tops, ski resorts, recreation, unspoiled beauty.. lavish Colorado people. Show them your love $$..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar…

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/behind-the-num…

While the backers of the public option making the news are farther-left Democrats and farther-left interest groups like the unions, the one interesting pro-public-option news item concerns doctors, though it was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, often a left-activist source, and was from a left-leaning think tank. Still worth noting — less strident than Kaiser or Families, USA, etc.

http://www.rwjf.org/healthreform/quality/produc…

Some cannot be controlled, those arising from societal aging and from continued medical advances.

Some can be controlled. For example, an obvious overdue reform addressing portability as well as costs would be a federal uniform standard benefit package, which of course would be true insurance, namely insurance against catastrophic and other expensive (hospitalization) events, and which would be the opposite of what many silly governments (and silly Dems in Washington) want currently, a rich, lavish, comprehensive health care benefits package, often including non-cost-effective preventive care for everyone. (This, at the same time some in Washington want to tax “excessive care” private plans as part of the package of gimmicks purported to pay for what they are promising the naive.)

How are you going to control costs? We wouldn't be having this discussion if it wasn't for skyrocketing costs. Wait, Wait, don't tell me . . . let's import Chinese doctors. That's how we got cheaper PC's.

Of course. And even vouchers or subsidies could be supplied as well.

This, in addition to all the reform measures well-known that have nothing to do with the public option.

After all, the public option has nothing to do with reform — nobody with a working brain believes the lie about (rigged) “competition” or “keeping the private insurers honest”: the public option has always been the incrementalist universal federal health care strategy of choice, intended from the start to replace the private insurers.

Insisting on real reform and on affordability has never required anything like the public option.

Let us see if the Democrats will be honest, for a real Change [tm] this year. Odds are, they won't.

My only critique of your piece would be that I would hope you would follow up with more concrete proposals, including specifically how to reform malpractice litigation ( artificial caps, worker's comp-like system, other?), how to expand coverage to more people, how to control/reduce skyrocketing health care costs and insurance costs, would you support special medical bankruptcy proceedings, how to address duplication of services, over diagnoses and over treatment, pre-existing condition coverage without pricing people out of the market, insurance cancellation tactics, etc. To your credit, you address the interstate competition issue. But, the one argument the other side has that seems to resonate is the failure of conservatives to bring forward alternatives to address the issues. What are your solutions to problems you admit exist?

Please do a follow up piece with concrete proposals and how those proposals would solve the problems without the flaws and dangers inherent in the various proposals now working their way through Copngress. Thank you.

I'm glad to see that someone else is taking notice of some of the root causes of our current medical mess, rather than just attacking symptoms.

Thank you.