Thanks for that link, excellent article exploding the myths about health care coverage in other countries.

I want to add to what they said about France: Not only are you completely unlimited about which doctor or hospital you choose, this includes private practitioners and hospitals. That is, if you go the uber-expensive hospital where the movie stars go, then you're still reimbursed for the standard amount, it just might be half or less of what they charge you in these ritzy places. It's entirely up to you.

The point here is that in contradiction to the lies from the right, not only does a public option not "destroy" either private insurance or private care, even universal single-payer care doesn't do so. There are plenty of private insurance and private clinics and hospitals in France and those who want to avail themselves of it all to get fancier care, or supplement the basic coverage.

--

By the way, the reason that the public option is looking in danger now is because Barack Obama trusted the Republicans to be interested in actually negotiating, when it's obvious they just want to obstruct and gain a "victory".

He probably knows this in some ways of course, but he and Rahm and so on have been in thrall to the idea of bipartisanship far too much right from the start.

The reason this is a mistake is that the party they're trusting to negotiate is A) far too tiny now to be considered "bi", they represent only 20% or less, and B) entirely and openly committed to obstructing passage of any bill that Obama wants, out of pure political scheming.

By treating them as serious about working together, he just handed the Blue Dog Democrats more incentive to slide to the right, that's really all it's accomplished. That's enough though, and may just sink real reform before it had a chance. We'll see. If the public option is dead (remember that Obama actually preferred single-payer, so the public option was already a big compromise) then this will be a massive, horrible failure, no one should have any illusions about that. If the Democrats couldn't pull this off with a huge majority, the White House, and a massive public mandate, then they deserve to be deserted like the Republicans have been, and we should all vote in two new parties.

How Many Trolls ...Will this thread attract -- they seem to be out in force on Salon lately.

I'm not sure how you can call them "trolls". Given that Camille Paglia is published by this site, and that's where a majority of them come from, led to her by Drudge and Rush Limbaugh praising her, I think you have to call them what they are:

Fans.

Trolls implies people just logging into a site made up of un-like-minded to cause trouble, trolling the enemy, as it were.

This many extreme right-wing posters coming to read one of their favorite writers at the site where she's published, pretty much impeaches the "troll" idea. These are fans, coming to read one of their own.

I was at some friends' apartment for dinner and we got talking about a certain city, and one geographic feature of it in particular, and after trying to describe it for a while I said "Well, here", pulled the iPhone out, and in a few seconds I had Googled a whole collection of photos for them to scroll through, showing the city.

The guy said "Huh. I guess I should get one of those phones." He explained that well yeah, he could get that on his Blackberry but it meant first calling up the Web browser, then going to Google, then images, then finding typing in and etc.

Huh? So I said well, yeah but I did all that too. This surprised him, amazed him in fact, because it seemed so quick. He said he didn't really use that sort of thing on the Blackberry because it just seemed so awkward and slow, so he just used it to make phone calls.

Shrug. We all have anecdotes.

It's interesting that you have to be a complete hypnotized fanatic to like the thing in the view of many here, seems silly. It's a nice piece of technology, aside from all of the e-mail and Web access it works well as a phone, I found ATT coverage was about the same as my prior T-Mobile had been, I like the way it does the contacts, text messages, and the virtual keyboard gets easier after a while, it felt slow at first, now feels fast.

Oh and I just tried typing "Been", capitalized and lower case, as the start of a sentence and in the middle of one-- and it never once suggested "Bern", or anything else.

I'm wondering if the author has a Swiss operating system and doesn't realize it, myself.

"iPhone nuts", "Obamabots", etc etc.

Salon letters in particular seems to attract this sort of ultra-stereotyping put-down complete with the cute little pet names, across the board from politics to technology.

"I HATE my iPhone" is just an article by a reasonable person expressing an opinion, but "Oh? Funny, I like mine" makes one an "iPhone nut."

Just something I noticed particularly at Salon, if I think of a cute little pejorative for it that pigeonholes and demonizes everyone who does it I'll log in and let you know.