Our private insurance driven healthcare system is like having the oil companies design our automobiles. Anyone trying to understand the various coverages, restrictions, and qualifications while shopping for a healthcare provider knows the frustration encountered by anyone trying to access American health care.

As an example, take a look at the Prescription Drug Formulary that is used for Medicare prescription drug coverage. Is the average person supposed to understand this encyclopedia of drugs, coverages, and cost tiers? Good luck with that. This Formulary is the result of drug industry influence on healthcare policy. One would almost believe that its complexity is by design, to cloud coverage costs to the extent that folks will throw up their hands and succumb blindly to the System.

The Republicans push "choice" as an argument against universal health care. It is a false premise that choice is eliminated in universal health care. A system can be designed that allows people to choose their providers.

Healthcare providers are having to charge insured patients more in order to provide medical services to the uninsured and emergency rooms. Insured patients are paying for this coverage in the most inefficient manner possible. Hospitals frequently overcharge insurance companies in order to cover the costs of emergency room operations.

Conservatives have driven American healthcare into the messs it is in today. The free market system may work for most of the people most of the time but when over 40,000,000 people are without proper healthcare something is obviously not working. Now, after two resounding defeats in the past elections perhaps the GOP will wake up and smell the coffee.

It almosst seems as though the insurance industry is managing operating room procedures down to the type of suture that is used in arterial surgery.

Doctors routinely modify reports and recommendations based upon what will be accepted by the insurers. This is a game that is played out every day in hospitals.

Your post is very enlightening.

If one wonders why the USA lags in medical research and development and why Americans do not live as long as people living in 37 other countries, one need look no further than our military-industrial complex and the political corruption that is caused by it.

We are a society that equates money with free speech (thank you Supreme Court) so countless dollars are wasted during every election cycle. We have a hugely wasteful military and inadequate government procurement programs that throw billions of dollars away every year.

By the time we have spent our way through needless wars (Vietnam, Iraq), million dollar jeeps, and pork barrel projects promoted by Congress we have wasted sums adequate to fund huge advances in medical treatment and care.

The money for adequate medical care is there. We just need the backbone to get our priorities in order.

Most of Rush's audience must be in padded rooms with chained-down TV sets and regular injections to keep them from eating their clothes.

The argument against the use of stem cells is based upon the fallacy that life is somehow "sacred", except for the death penalty and preemptive warfare which most of the screamers support.

Obama's been in office barely two months, and you are expecting "change" as if a switch can be thrown that will immediately flush out the rot that 8 years of Bush and the Republicans have created.

is that the money industry must be highly regulated.

Call it what you want, regulation must be used much more effectively than in the past. The Republicans are quick to blame "greedy homeowners" trying to leverage their inflated equities, but isn't that capitalism?

It is amazing to me that folks actually believed in the permanence of increasing property values when boom and bust cycles have always been a part of our economy. The financial industry played into this by offering mortgages to unqualified buyers and by accepting questionable property appraisal values.

Then, the icing on the cake was the repackaging of mortgages into derivatives to be cut up and sold to God-knows-who.

If this industry does not deserve close oversight we will have not learned anything and this scenario will be played again and again.

In the movie "When Worlds Collide" people reacted to the immediate threat of Earth colliding with another planet. The key word here is "immediate".

Most people cannot grasp the meaning of "global warming". They are looking for something that they can point to and say "there is global warming" and then they must understand the data and consequences of climate change and they must be able to visualize this over a long term.

This we are expecting from a population that is semi-literate in science at best?

"When Worlds Collide" was more than a science fiction film, it was an accurate predictor of peoples' thinking that started with disbelief of the impending disaster to the panic that followed when the other planet was filling the sky.

I fear that no meaningful change in our behavior will occur until the effects of climate change are apparent in our daily lives and then it will be too late.

is guaranteed as long as the likes of Limbaugh are given legitimacy in the GOP.

is coming, GOP. Break out the Kool-Aid.

You are comparing a potential President to cabinet members and advisors when you suggest that Obama's failed cabinet selections equal McCain's selection of Palin as VP.

After 8 years of Bush mismanagement it is a wonder that anyone of value would remain in the service of our government but, to his credit, Obama has done pretty well with his cabinet picks so far.

In the interest of freedom and justice, the Bush Administration's lies and propaganda that were designed to drive us into an unecessary war must be thoroughly investigated. In addition to the Administration, Congress, CIA, etc. a compliant press must be held to account for the massive fraud that was engineered and delivered to the world as justifiication for a preemptive war.