Another aspect of the gap in health care costs is how much money doctors make. It's changed drastically over the years of course, and many doctors are considering getting out of the business because of insurance problems. However the pay in the US is still much higher than elsewhere.

There's a segment in the movie Sicko in which he interviews a doctor in the UK who makes quite a bit, somewhere near $200,000, and drives an Audi. The doctor gently suggests that the difference is, in the UK you can live quite comfortably as a doctor if you're successful, but that perhaps you can't have TWO Audis and twice that salary.

I think in general terms however it's insurance that's the problem. We're trained from childhood that competition is always good, that it lowers prices and makes people innovate and this benefits us, the consumer. And to some degree this is true. However we don't demand that police forces compete, for the most part, nor fire departments, nor emergency call centers.

When we handed over health care to private insurance companies it made health care a profit industry, and therein lie our woes.

The right has always disagreed of course, but even many of them have now come to realize that it simply isn't working anymore. Corporations are suffering as much as the rest of us from high health care costs, and when corporations suffer, the right starts to listen.

That is a great story.

I shall now be cheered as I go on with the day by images of gondoliers singing "O sole mio" as they pass the pyramids in the distance.

Not to mention someone attacking windmills from a donkey with a light saber, but that's another story.

How will America afford universal healthcare?

Not to give a flip answer, either, to what was a sincere question but in the shortest way I can put it:

France spends a fraction of what we do on health care, and achieves universal coverage nonetheless. In fact, they wouldn't dream of not doing so.

And here's the shocker: Health care in France is far better than in the US, in my experience, and I've lived in both for many years.

It's true that I've experienced long waits for appointments, marginal care, insane amounts of paperwork and bureaucracy that gummed things up unbearably-- but that was all in the US system.

I know it's exactly the opposite of what the right wingers swear as gospel and have convinced half the country is true, but I can only tell you from first hand experience that it's simply backwards.

So to return to my answer to you, are we that pathetic that something France pulls off, we can't accomplish? Really?

Of the two health care systems, the one we should be afraid of is our own.

is that Republicans will always attack, always complain, always obstruct-- at least the current incarnation of the party.

That is, you could cut spending, cut regulations, you could do anything and everything they demand, and they'd be demanding more. Or something different.

One reason we know this is the "Tea Party" people, stirred up, if not actually invented, by Fox News. See Matt Taibbi's blog here for the most satisfying takedown of the whole absurd thing, in short it's utterly absurd that after what's gone on over the last eight years, suddenly now these people would be concerned about spending to the point of calling it "socialism" and calling for secession.

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/19/questions-for-teabaggers/

The point is that you get this no matter what. Barack Obama has in fact been bending over backwards to avoid "taking over" any private business, and has kept the spending needed to lift us out of this depression to about half of what many economists like Reich have recommended.

The result? Tea parties and accusations of facism from the right.

If you want a great example of how futile any appeasement of the right is, take a look at the Washington Post these days. Years ago they were the epitome of what was seen as "the liberal press", and thus an attempt to compensate was born.

Today, Post columnists include two of the leaders of the Neoconservative movement, perhaps the most reviled and debunked fringe right wing group in recent memory-- and these are their spokesmen, I mean really the intellectual force behind it, Kristol and Kagan, and there they are in the Post. They're joined there by George W Bush's chief speech writer, Michael Gerson, who continues to pump out the views that 72% of the country disapproved of for the last years of Bush's term.

Next, we have Charles Krauthammer, someone slightly to the right of Dick Cheney, and then George Will, who needs no introduction, and has recently taken up climate change denier as his newest persona. This is followed by Jackson Diehl-- check out his column today for a good look at how he thinks.

This is not to mention the entire herd of "moderate" right wingers like Kathleen Parker and Richard Cohen, who actually dared to question Bush or McCain's wisdom now and then, but remain conservative to the core.

The result? The comments section is awash in people screaming "liberal media" as an accusation against the Washington Post.

The moral of the story is: They will never be satisfied, will never stop. Never listen to them. You lose in every direction if you do.