The secret to success in the insurance business is to be meticulously careful about whom one insures and how much one charges each customer based on the relative risk of loss that customer presents. Right? People with DUI's pay more than drivers with safe records. Duh.

Obama’s so-called "plan", without a public option to absorb high-risk users and with a prohibition on insurance companies doing what insurance companies do – i.e., manage risk by choosing whom to insure and how much to charge – cannot work. If that isn’t true, someone please enlighten me as to why.

I admit my info may be a bit outdated. I lived in Switzerland for two years, but that was some time ago. If it has since become a melting pot and a hotbed of political and social unrest with myriad interest groups jostling for position and corporations pulling all the big political strings, please forgive me for not keeping up with the times.

Someone please explain to me how Obama’s plan can work without a public option.

Here’s the problem as I see it: insurance is a business. Even without obscene profits, a business has to take in more than it puts out or it can’t pay the help, the rent or the electricity bill, never mind the shareholders’ dividend – and it must do this in an atmosphere of competition.

The secret in the insurance business is to be careful about whom one insures and how much one charges one’s customers based on the relative risk of loss each customer presents. Right? That’s why a oil-rig worker with a DUI and a couple of injury accidents (certainly a "pre-existing condition") on his record pays much more for car insurance than a teetotalling civil engineer with a clean driving record. If we passed a law forbidding insurance companies from discriminating between the chronic crasher and the heedful wheeler, their entire business model would collapse. Their only option would be to charge everyone a higher uniform price that protected them against the costs incurred by the few. Even then, they’d have to be allowed to adjust that uniform price occasionally as the mix of risky-to-safe customers varied. Otherwise, over time, they’d be almost guaranteed to go broke.

Obama’s plan, without a public option to absorb high-risk users and a prohibition on insurance companies doing what insurance companies do – i.e., manage risk – cannot work. If that isn’t true, someone please enlighten me as to why.

Stop trying to draw comparisons between Switzerland and what might happen in the United States. Have you ever been to Switzerland? Do you have any comprehension at all of the Swiss mentality-slash-culture?? While there are three languages spoken in Switzerland, the country is a tighter, more homogeneous community than any whites-only, no-Jews-allowed country club you've ever seen. There is no poverty in Switzerland. There are no underclasses in Switzerland. There is very little crime in Switzerland -- if the law says "Don't do this," a Swiss doesn't do it. There are no illegal immigrants -- barely any immigrants at all. Everyone gets an education. And by the way, corporations do not control the government of Switzerland. The list goes on and on. The idea that because the Swiss have a private-enterprise model of health care we could have one too is simply not a helpful one.

Thanks. The elegance of the Byrds by way of Primal Scream therapy, but...okay. I think I've heard better covers but I'm glad I heard this. Thanks again.

Can't find Husker Du's "Eight Miles High," a favorite song I'd love to hear well-covered. Not on iTunes, anyway, where other HD songs are featured. Anyone?

The corporate media's job is exactly to perpetuate the myths. Their favorite advertisers don't want health-care reform that's in any way meaningful.

No, Bob, they don't. And they have enough people reacting positively to their "message" that they don't feel they need any.

Why does Salon give this woman shelf space?

Didn't you see "Dark Knight"? Heck, in one night the Joker wired an entire big-ass hospital to blow with dozens of sequential blasts, while the hospital was in round-the-clock operation, with only a couple helpers. And guess what? No one in the hospital noticed! Not a nurse, not an orderly, not a doctor or a patient; nobody!

Don't youse know anything about how evildoers do their evil? Sheesh!

The fringe you're talking about is composed of people whose reptilian brains are more prominently in control of their feelings, thoughts and actions than is true of an educated person. Education doesn't just stuff the brain with information, it actually evolves the brain.

These easily-manipulated voters have always been with us, though as our education system sinks into the bog, there will be more of them. What's different, or more pronounced, today is that the right wing -- especially with the appearance on the scene of Karl Rove and his ilk -- has perfected techniques for stimulating that lizard-brain's fear response. The good citizens who are now calling for government to keep its dirty hands off their Medicare didn't protest the war in any of its aspects, even after it was a manifest clusterfuck, because they were still afraid of WMD's, of 9/11-by-Saddam, anthrax, you name it.

Fear doesn't subside quickly if at all, when higher brain functions aren't present to counteract irrational spectres. There's really nothing we can do about these people today; they're set in stone. What we can do is commit to a more educated citizenry for the future.

How about completely imaginary "death panels"?

The CIA should have been dismantled long ago. After the Church hearings would've been a good time. Certainly when the USSR fell apart. It isn't any good at its job and the job itself is of dubious relevance in present times, anyway.