I think health care reform is the right thing to do for this country, but it will almost certainly be a negative thing for me personally - none of what's being discussed is upside - my plan already is better than any gov't plan being discussed, and my taxes are likely to increase. I'm supporting health care reform _against_ my personal interest. In fact, maybe I'm the dummy.

Are you under the impression for some reason that if a public plan is included then you'll be forced to abandon whatever plan you have now and sign up for the public plan? Is this the "negative thing" a public plan would be for you, in your mind?

Regarding your taxes going up, this will, or has already, only happen at all under Obama as President if you make more than $250,000.00 a year. And that's profit by the way, if you're talking about a small business, not gross. Not to harp on that but McCain and Joe the not-even-one-term Plumber got a lot people bamboozled about that particular equation.

If you're imagining the first part about being forced into a public plan against your will, I can only suggest that you're listening to right wing talking points and believing them (even if you're in favor of reform, which I applaud), thus demonstrating exactly what you're claiming doesn't exist, i.e. uninformed voters.

If you're making a quarter of a million dollars a year, which I have to presume from your second claim, then you're especially exempt from being forced out of your plan since you can afford the ritziest private health insurance out there if you ask me.

These will exist even with a public option by the way, and even with 100% universal health care. One reason we know this is that where I live, in a country with 100% public coverage, there's still as much private insurance coverage and private specialists and all the rest of it as you could want. Lots of people use them. This doesn't, as right wingers usually like to reply at this point, "prove that the public plan is useless." Quite the contrary, it proves that in the best of both worlds, you have the best of both worlds, and that government administered, citizen-pooled coverage doesn't destroy the private health insurance industry.

Oh and if you're not making 250K, then you're also listening to right wing nonsense about your taxes going up, since revenue neutral is part of everyone's plan who's even halfway sensible.

What's missing in that Canadian story in your recounting and in the way the right told it is this:

The woman in question paid the Mayo clinic out of pocket for treatment, as she has every right to do under any system, Canadian, US, any of them. Actually "paid" is kind of a misnomer, she's apparently 100K in debt now.

She decided that what her doctors were recommending wasn't good enough, wasn't fast enough, and so she paid herself to have it done sooner. She could have paid a Canadian private clinic, they certainly exist. She chose one in the US. Any American has the same option, and if you think that any American can automatically have things like that covered by their insurance, you're dreaming.

What people are trying to do with this is use it to compare the two systems, straight across, but it's utter misdirection. Had the woman been American, it's very likely she might have had no insurance whatsoever, or even more likely by the percentages, had insurance that wouldn't pay for the procedure, would only pay part, or in some way would leave her out the 100k anyway to get it taken care of.

It happens all the time. In the US. And that's not only not an exaggeration, it's an understatement.

We've had very different experiences apparently with the US health care system.

I've lived mostly with a single-payer, universal-coverage system for about ten years and it's worked extremely well, and I've spent one year in the middle of that back in the US with work-supplied coverage.

Of course, I've seen six-month waits for appointments, massive amounts of paperwork, and so on.

However that was all entirely in the US system.

I read comments from those opposed to universal coverage in the US who criticize Canadian and French health care and I wonder who's feeding them this stuff, or perhaps they're just willfully inventing it.

In my experience it's been entirely the opposite.

I agree that the issue needs to be discussed but with rational, fact-based discussions. The idea that some woman has never waited six months in the US for treatment is simply absurd, I've experienced it myself many times.

These are simply scare tactics, things like this trumped-up Canadian story, and it's been the MO of the right since Ronald Reagan in his pre-President ultra-right crackpot days. The day he was elected President I knew the country had slid to a dangerously fringe position. It's sliding back but it's going to take a long, long time and the misinformation hasn't stopped.