Office visits in France: 20 Euros, 80 Euros for Rolls Royce extra-fancy specialist if you prefer.

Surgery in Western Europe in general: 20% of the cost in the US, or often less. And this is if you pay for it yourself as a visitor, if you're a resident of any local country just paying taxes has already covered all of this (by the way, taxes on salaries are statistically roughly the same as the US, despite all the hysteria)

Wait times for appointments: One week at most, in my experience. Surgery took a few weeks to schedule.

Full dental care: included.

Bankruptcies due to medical expenses per population: Zero. Pick any number you want, per thousand population, per hundred, per million, it's always zero.

Watching the right wing hysteria in the US complain over and over about the horrors of "socialized medicine" in places like France: Priceless.

Though not in the way that word is used in the credit card ads.

So all those anyone unhappy with the progress on health insurance reform are now, in Camille Paglia's opinion, in agreement with her on all of her vile right wing gasbaggery?

Nice try. "See, I was right, Rush Limbaugh is a great American, and you all agree with me now obviously because you've criticized Obama too!"

I never thought Paglia's nonsense could get worse, but I have to admit, one thing you could at least count on in the past is that her columns, or more to the point, the accompanying letters, wouldn't be dull.

Now however, even that's happened. Progressives (and anyone with critical thinking skills, if you ask me) hate her, and right wingers love her. It's boringly predictable, letter after letter.

Snooze.

Who really should be included, the best article I've seen at summing up the story so far.

Excerpts:

"So whether or not there will be a public option in the end will likely come down to Baucus, one of the biggest whores for insurance-company money in the history of the United States. The early indications are that there is no public option in the Baucus version..."

"Even worse, Baucus has set things up so that the final Senate bill will be drawn up by six senators from his committee: a gang of three Republicans (Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming) and three Democrats (Baucus, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico) known by the weirdly Maoist sobriquet "Group of Six."

"This is what the prospects for real health care reform come down to — whether one of three Republicans from tiny states with no major urban populations decides, out of the goodness of his or her cash-fattened heart, to forsake forever any contributions from the health-insurance industry..."

The whole article is well worth reading, despite being seven pages long. (paste link below or click my signature).

Read it and weep.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong/2

Because unless you change that, no one is ever really going to take you seriously.

Really, it's an embarrassment across the blogosphere, from what I see.

It's sort of like the Washington Post's ombudsman writing columns about obsessive "fact checking" while at the same time they publish George Will. The one entirely cancels out the other.

Not lure. Lore.

I can see where you unconsciously may have gotten the idea of the right wing "luring" people, similar to a the notion of a "dog whistle" perhaps, but the expression you're looking for is "in right wing lore", as in stories, tales, and so on.

Otherwise impeccable as usual.

Am I Seeing Things?

Or is there an incredibly lame new format to the letters page??

Yes, I guess there is.

That's really a shame, really the only thing I liked about Salon's comments section was the layout, each person got a nice large space, the bold headings were easy to read, and it was clear where one ended and the other started.

It really was almost the only positive thing about it, since the non-moderation or rating policy makes it a wide-open free for all of lowest common denominator ranting for the most part, degenerating especially recently into flame wars with all of the Drudge and Limbaugh readers that Paglia now draws in. The content was always horrible, but the visuals were unusually welcoming.

For anyone at Salon who's interested, a first-glance critique of the new format, FWIW:

The grayed-out headings fade into the background, and this part:

Read Oedipus Schmoedipus's other letters

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is actually the most prominent and jumps off the page, so that scanning down the page it's what your eye catches first, over and over running down the page.

This combined with the fact that the faded headings are pushed right up below the date, which is actually more prominent than the headings also, makes it hard for the eye to find where one letter starts and the other stops.

I mean typographically/artistically it's fine, there are just some functional issues I think. The old way was really much better.

Interesting, looking at this page again from another monitor (a fairly high contrast 22" monitor) I can actually see the letter headings fairly easily, even if they're still gray.

Earlier I was reading it on a Mac Book 13.5" and the headings were barely visible, the gray was much lighter.

At the very (very) least I would suggest just putting some space between the Date and Time line at the end of a comment, and the heading of the next comment. The headings appear more related to the previous comment than to their own.

One of my favorite things about online comments-- and it never fails, someone always does it - are the people who take time to read letters and then write a letter of their own consisting of a complaint that if people don't like something, they should just avoid reading it, and certainly should not write to complain about it.