I have nothing against having the government subsidize health care for those who cannot afford to buy their own. I could support a plan where everyone has catastrophic coverage equal to 10% of their adjusted gross income. Those who could not afford to pay for the major med policy would be subsidized.

The people are corrupt. I am a senior citizen on Medicare and most of the people I know take no responsibility for their own health, and as I said before are almost gleeful when their Doc prescribes expensive treatments. Will a single payer system change that? Doctors, Big Pharma, and Hospitals are powerful players in The Congress. Will a single payer system change that? I hold with Mark Twain when he said that there is no indigenous criminal class in the US, except The Congress.

The sure sign of a corrupt proposal is when there is a requirement for universal coverage, i.e., no one can avoid being in it. Most of us have no need for a single-payer system, because most of us are healthy. The call for universal (and compulsory) coverage is a cover-up for compulsory subsidization for the chronically sick. It is essentially the use of an extremely regressive tax on the middle class to subsidize a minority. A far better approach would be to use the General Fund to subsidize the chronically ill. That would place the burden on the wealthy who provide most of the funds for the General Fund. An alternative would be use a national sales tax for that subsidy, which would again be a far more progressive tax than "universal coverage".

The call for single-payer universal coverage is the call for a highly regressive tax to subsidize the health costs of the sickly minority. That is why is it has to be universal, so that we cannot escape the regressive nature of the tax.

I live in a state where there are large numbers of expatriate Californians. They sell their tract house in CA for close to a million and come here and buy a $400,000 McMansion to live in and one to speculate on. Our town is OK so far; it was recently named one of the 10 best cities in Inc. Up north where my daughter lives it's a different story. The bubble burst hard. There was a guy traveling the country putting on seminars on how to get rich in her area. He would collect a few million and go up an buy a dozen or so newly built houses. We almost rented one, but the longest lease was 6 months. Scumbags and druggies did most of the renting, so the developers had a hard time selling the house next door. It's all collapsed now, and there is a couple of years of houses on the market. In our capital city three quarters of the houses on the market are owned by speculators, who are getting a little desperate. I expect a lot more price erosion in the next year, maybe a panic. TFL

My daughter just told me of a couple in her town who came from CA and bought two houses for speculation. They live in a rental. The wife discovered that that area has a real winter and now wants to move back to CA. They cannot sell their speculation houses. Real estate booms suck in the suckers, just like stock market booms. Suckers of course always wait until the boom is well established and near its end before they risk their money.

I notice that Bear Stearns just gave up an effort to transfer their risk in one of those funds that invested in risky mortgages. The one thing that is always true of Wall Street is that they always try to bail themselves out on the backs of the middle class small investor.

Prices of the funds that invested in risky mortgages have a long way to drop before they are realistically priced. A lot of high rollers are going to get burned, unless they can bribe the Pres and Congress to bail them out. The next year will be interesting.

I suspect that the Chinese and Saudis are investing in US financial assets that are related in some way to real wealth creation, as opposed to greedy, corrupt and stupid Americans.

She'll be alone and have lots of cats.

As a thirty year resident of Southeast Idaho, I was glad to see Alberto's troubles in our capital city. I worked on the campaign of the last Democratic candidate for governor. He won in the major cities, but the rural folk got their usual Republican elected. Alberto should avoid the big cities of Idaho; they are not Republican.