By: @troy
Are you actually saying that welfare recipients have a choice of healthcare providers, from which to receive the best quality heathcare? It doesn’t have to be hypothetical, my Mom is on Medicare in California (which goes by the google-proof “MediCal”). Her doctors in the private sector when she was under Dad’s insurance don’t take MediCal patients, since MediCal doesn’t pay them enough, and the supply/demand is apparently such that they don’t need to. But she DOES have access to a simulacrum of socialized medicine within the MediCal system, with access to 3 or 4 doctors in the fifth largest city in California. They key thing for conservatives is that the MediCal people do get some access to services, without impacting the really-for-profit mainstream. She’s got an XXXogist appointment scheduled next month and I think this was the specialist being a nice guy and making an exception for her. Conservatives are fine with that. What they don’t want to see happen is that everyone, ie. them, have to join the MediCal system and wait for service with the campesinos and other undesirables. They also know doctors don’t want that.
By: Kirth Gerson
Once again, the Obama administration, instead of delivering change, comes up with more of the same. I am surprised, really. And deeply disappointed. Cue the “but he’s only been in office six months” apologists.
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By: elpapacito
How difficult is to understand that private companies do save a lot of money when they don’t pay insurance claims as can afford an army of lawyers and lobbying, while you can’t? The alternative may be a slightly croocked and corrupted public healthcare, but something you can dive your nose into as they have to produce PUBLIC records, as opposed to private company records which are mostly secret for the masses, except for balance sheets which are often meaningless anyhow? Of course if you sit tight and wait for your politician or insurer to help your ass out of trouble you will get nothing.
By: dilettante
It’s a clear problem once you separate out the pieces: You left something else out: the healthcare situation now is even killing huge companies. Do you think Ford and GM would have been in near as much trouble if they hadn’t had to provide health insurance for their employees and retirees? And small businesses never have a chance. If what’s good for GM is good for America, this has to get fixed.
By: @troy
Me: “Why should the productive members of society be forced at gunpoint to help them?” They are already being forced, in that taxpayers and the actually insured foot the cost for emergency visits by uninsured people. Emergency visits that tend to cost more than regular, preventive health care. Actually, reading this essay I think my original jape above wasn’t quite right. If that is true, and it resonates with me, conservatives are truly afraid of the loss of choice and the overbearing involvement of Gummint into the free market wonder that is modern medicine. There’s nothing wrong with medicine in this country if you are independently wealthy. Conservatives don’t want to see this system destroyed by a Democrat patronage system on the order of the Postal Service or DMV. They believe in their bones that the competition of the free market is more reliable than a centralized planning. So conservatives aren’t necessarily opposed to government charity, they just want these government services to be limited, decentralized, inferior, under-funded, so as to not interfere with the existing private system for regular people. Same thing with Medicare in the 1960s, and the sam thing Bush II tried with Social Security in early 2005, when he thought he had some political capital.
By: Daddy-O
There was no effective resistance to the US invasion of Iraq because many Americans were behind him due to the fabrication of evidence that Sadam was constructing WMD’s and cavorting with terrorists. America was out for blood and revenge after 9/11.
By: bowline
I’m Canadian. Part of the right-wing campaign to scare Americans into opposing any change in their system has been the recruitment of one Shona Holmes, a Canadian with a tale of a life threatening wait that was only resolved by a trip to the Mayo clinic in Arizona. Her story has been running in TV ads and she has been making the talk show circuit. (There seem to be some factual problems with her tale). I started a Facebook group (self-link) to allow Canadians to stand up and say that Ms. Holmes does not speak for them. There’s been good response after just a few days. We’ve had some pretty amazing personal stories posted, too.
By: kliuless
fwiw, here’re some articles i’ve come across recently that i thought were interesting re: The politics of healthcare reform…An Interview With Kenneth Arrow – “There are information asymmetries in this story… Insurance companies have high premiums to protect themselves. The ones who come to the insurance company are sicker and the people have to pay more. You have adverse selection. You have moral hazard. And the doctor does what’s on the safe side — defensive medicine — without regard to cost. These are fundamental conditions that make health insurance difficult.” Why I Oppose National Health Care (invokes PCT! badly imo, like see above, and the rebuttals in the comments i think are also nice 
Health Care: The Wyden-Bennett Plan[*] Equity and Efficiency in Health Care Markets A Public Plan A Market for Health Reform Children of the revolution – “Mr Klein exemplifies the generation of young left-leaning policy wonks, journalists and activists who have been formed politically by the reaction against Bush-era conservatism, and for whom the Obama presidency represents the first experience of wielding political power. Like Mr Klein, many of these young progressives are fundamentally moderate, process-oriented wonks who, long before the Obama campaign even began, had accepted that the pragmatic limitations of real-world American politics rule out any utopian, or even first-best, solutions to most public-policy problems. They have happily dedicated themselves to figuring out what kinds of reform are possible within the constraints of corporate and interest-group lobbying, ideological and partisan divisions, and America’s kludgey, creaking 220-year-old machinery of government. “And they’re not the first such set of moderate, worldly-wise liberal policy wonks to arrive in Washington. Towards the end of D.A. Pennebaker’s great documentary of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, ‘The War Room’, the young George Stephanopoulos, then Mr Clinton’s communications coordinator, sits down to give a final pep talk to the rest of the campaign staff on the night before the election. He refers to the ‘haiku’ James Carville wrote on a whiteboard at the beginning of the campaign; the line everyone remembers is ‘It’s the economy, stupid’, but we’ve largely forgotten the other two lines, ‘change vs. more of the same’ and, tellingly, ‘don’t forget health care’…” Charlie Rose: A conversation with Peter Orszag, Director, Office of Management & Budget Doug Elmendorf on the Hot Seat – “the situation changes dramatically when the discussion breaks out into the open as has happened with the very public dispute on this issue between Office of Management and Budget Director (and immediate past CBO Director) Peter Orzag and the current CBO Director Doug Elemendorf…”also btw von linked to a handy health care comparison tool from the Kaiser Family Foundation 
cheers!
