Thanks for your response. My husband recently had to give up alcohol because of the amplifying effects of one of his medications (well-crafted beer being somewhat less enjoyable when one cannot remain awake through half a bottle). He was definitely a beer enthusiast and loved discovering rare and interesting flavors. We may have to try your family's solution.

talk about "the underinsured" and "the poor" as if none of us may actually be here reading and participating in this debate. We figure so little in their understanding of this issue that we are essentially invisible in these discussions.

So let me be clear - the rationing of healthcare that is going on right now at the hands of insurance companies is a matter of life or death. It has, for example, resulted in my life in a husband who has lost all touch with reality and can no longer function because the goddamn insurance companies refused to pay for the medications that actually worked. And now that he can't work, guess what? Uninsurable. Pretty much permanently. Why? Because when the insurance companies yanked him off his meds, he became so mentally ill that he could no longer think or feel and, in a confused and psychotic state, he tried to take his own life. So now he's permanently off the rolls, thanks to the fucking insurance companies.

Know how long they wanted him in the hospital after he almost killed himself? 3 days. 3. Fucking. Days.

Know how much debt we ended up with, we who now suddenly have one less income and must wait for months for an uncertain response from social security? $5000.00. For which we were fucking lucky. However, $3000.00 of that was from procedures the company initially approved for coverage, then retroactively decided not to cover after all. Making us in debt over our heads and unable to pay insurance premiums and hence, me too, now uninsured, unless I drop out of college to work full time, thereby guranteeing that I will remain poor for the forseeable future.

This system is a feedback loop that is designed to keep rich people rich, poor people poor, and middle class people insulated and deluded about their own level of risk.

At least if it were a public plan I'd have the ability to vote the motherfuckers out of office who set policies like that.

Anyone who tries to distract you from realities like this, who tries to fabricate life or death issues like the so-called death panels to justify withholding medical treatment from poor people is indeed repeating Cain's line "am I my brother's keeper?" That line is so brilliant because it's a distraction. It is saying "I don't have a positive responsibility to take action for the good of another" (which is ethically debatable but not monstrous) when what they are actually doing is actively acting to do harm to others. That's the point of that line. Cain's a murderer. Anyone who opposes some form of universal, affordable health coverage is callously ignoring the corporate-sanctioned murder that goes on in this country every day.

Readerreader's condescending concessions about a willingness to donate charitably to my healthcare - as if I ought to feel satisfied with my life hanging on noblesse oblige rather than expecting to be supported by a society to which I contribute - are a great illustration of the virulent classism infusing this entire issue. Underlying these cynical and manipulative attempts to distract us from the real issues with paranoid fantasies about coercive end-of-life counseling and nazism is a real sense that we poor folk deserve to be sicker and to die earlier and in more pain than other people. Barny Frank's response is so cathartic because it treats such callous and self-centered behavior with the disdain that it deserves.

in being uninsured is that I am not contributing money to the lobby that is actively working to keep me from getting healthcare. Just to be clear, guys, those millions of dollars being spent to defeat healthcare reform? They got that money from you.

@eeave -- I sure hope you're wrong, but more and more I suspect you are right. This whole thing could end up being a giant wet kiss to the insurance companies.