That's correct. The kids are supposed to write letters to themselves about how they can help Obama do a better job and write down in a scrap book his most famous sayings. This sounds like praying to me to the Obama diety. I thought prayers in public schools was unlawful,and hardly the kind of thing a non-believing, democratic president would want to be associated with.

Obama has not addressed how the medical profession and the thousands of HC providers will be impacted by his policies. His call for more competition to lower costs is interesting particularly when a lot of overly-competitive industries are doing poorly simply because they cannot charge enough to cover their fixed costs. Competition is great in industries where there is little or no fixed costs but utilities, for example, would all be out of business if free market competition was the rule. Same could be true in the medical profession where there are very high fixed costs that need to be recovered, or the industry gets Hollowed-Out. Look to the airline industry where marginal pricing for every seat on a flight requires that every seat be sold, every bag is weighed and priced, everything is measured out. That is the only way to survive in that industry because of constant price wars. Obama himself has said that his govt subsidized coop or public option will rein in inefficiencies by basically starting a price war with all the private players that would effectively put them out of business.

how do we take care of the 10-15M illegals in the country right now? It's like they don't exist. But they do and they consume medical services like the rest of us. If we exclude them from all HC programs, how does this solve the moral imperative that Obama and Kennedy have been talking about since day 1 to cover everybody?

Once again, the solutions are half-baked and self-serving to certain constituents.

Obama gave a nice "feel good" speech last night and everybody walked away feeling perhaps a little better about Obama Care than yesterday morning. The lefties feel better because Obama showed some evidence of a backbone and the whole thing started to sound very Canadian or French, while the righties scored points with the no abortion clause, the conscience clause, among other things. But the fundamentals got messy over things like distant triggers going off in the future, wringing imaginary savings out of the current system to pay for it, pull-backs of services if costs get out of line, etc. etc.

This whole thing is not well thought out because it is a mish-mash of ideas that are designed to be a "zero-sum" game, that is if designed properly, must be budget-neutral. Nice try! The last time we allowed this sort of thing to run amok, the result was a Wall Street meltdown because the "smart guys" really did not know what the f*** they were doing. And now we have Obama who is also a really smart guy thinking like a Wall Street guru because he has unlimited sources of capital to play with. Or does he?

I just read readerreader's post and he/she is making a lot of sense because at the end of the day, everything has to balance, somehow.

Instead, the vast number of posts are hung up on the left vs. right mentality and totally miss the underlying fundamentals which are simply (i) does this bill deliver as promised? (ii) will this bill do more harm than good? (iii) are there clear winners and losers? (iv) is it sustainable in the long-run? (v) does the bill make sense based purely on its merits? If all of these score positive, then, in the aggregate, it is probably worth the risk and the incremental cost to push ahead, but if the requisite analysis (of course nobody will take the time to do it) only raises more questions and uncertainties, then it is a another bad bill chasing a good cause.

If Obama is set against providing insurance subsidies or a government handout for illegals, will they not continue to use the emergency rooms in droves?

Also, Bill O'Reilly tonite was all over the anicipated shortage of medical professionals with 40 million new patients entering the system on a systematic basis. And he noted, rather correctly, that Obama is silent on this crucial issue. The actual physical capacity of the medical establishment will have to increase by 10-20% immediately to handle the volumes and still meet service expectations. In CA, we call this gridlock and the solution is to spend billions adding new lanes to the 405. How will that happen and who will pay for it and more importantly, is it assumed as an up-front investment in the calculations?

Hey, Joan, I hope you are paying attention to this thread. All I see you do is carry Obama's water around.