I have Anthem Blue Cross insurance and last week, I got a survey call from them looking for people to go to town hall meetings on health care. They claim they want to be part of the solution to reduce costs. I thought that was pretty outrageous considering they just raised my premiums to 200 per month, and I had to go to a different pla with a much higher deduction.

If Medicare & Medicaid is in trouble, the solution is get rid of Medicade, turn Medicare into a Universal Health Care plan for all, and support it by bringing in more people to pay premiums based on their income to support a Universal Single Payer system.

Services should be based on preventative, and Limit the amount of money spent on keeping people alive in the very first and last hours of death, who would not survive without a support systems.

We saw what the availability of easy loan money did to home prices: They went through the roof. Has anyone considered the possibility that our system of having most medical bills paid by insurance has done the same thing to the price of medical care?

My point is that I think we need more than just a new way to pay for medical care. I think we need a new way to deliver medical care that doesn't focus on consuming every available penny of medical insurance claim payment money.

Not trying to fan any flames here, just would like rational, non-condescending info on this.

Its acknowleged that Medicaid and Medicare costs are ever increasing, and take up larger and larger amounts of the budget because of the rapid rise in healthcare costs. Why would universal healthcare be any different?

What is it about universal healthcare that would keep healthcare costs from rising? Wouldn't these costs continue to rise like Medicare and Medicaid?

is that Republicans will always attack, always complain, always obstruct-- at least the current incarnation of the party.

That is, you could cut spending, cut regulations, you could do anything and everything they demand, and they'd be demanding more. Or something different.

One reason we know this is the "Tea Party" people, stirred up, if not actually invented, by Fox News. See Matt Taibbi's blog here for the most satisfying takedown of the whole absurd thing, in short it's utterly absurd that after what's gone on over the last eight years, suddenly now these people would be concerned about spending to the point of calling it "socialism" and calling for secession.

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/19/questions-for-teabaggers/

The point is that you get this no matter what. Barack Obama has in fact been bending over backwards to avoid "taking over" any private business, and has kept the spending needed to lift us out of this depression to about half of what many economists like Reich have recommended.

The result? Tea parties and accusations of facism from the right.

If you want a great example of how futile any appeasement of the right is, take a look at the Washington Post these days. Years ago they were the epitome of what was seen as "the liberal press", and thus an attempt to compensate was born.

Today, Post columnists include two of the leaders of the Neoconservative movement, perhaps the most reviled and debunked fringe right wing group in recent memory-- and these are their spokesmen, I mean really the intellectual force behind it, Kristol and Kagan, and there they are in the Post. They're joined there by George W Bush's chief speech writer, Michael Gerson, who continues to pump out the views that 72% of the country disapproved of for the last years of Bush's term.

Next, we have Charles Krauthammer, someone slightly to the right of Dick Cheney, and then George Will, who needs no introduction, and has recently taken up climate change denier as his newest persona. This is followed by Jackson Diehl-- check out his column today for a good look at how he thinks.

This is not to mention the entire herd of "moderate" right wingers like Kathleen Parker and Richard Cohen, who actually dared to question Bush or McCain's wisdom now and then, but remain conservative to the core.

The result? The comments section is awash in people screaming "liberal media" as an accusation against the Washington Post.

The moral of the story is: They will never be satisfied, will never stop. Never listen to them. You lose in every direction if you do.

Three Questions:

Where is the money going to come from to subsidize universal healthcare?

Assuming a Medicare model is adapted, where is the money going to come from to provide free medical training? No one is going to shoulder $200K + of debt (this is not an exaggeration) to have their earnings slashed to bits by the government, which is what will happen if a Medicare model is adapted.

It bears repeating: where is the money going to come from? We are trillions in debt, involved in two wars, and in a depression. We cannot afford universal healthcare without significantly raising taxes and most people are not going to accept that.

I'm all in favor of universal healthcare but the foundation to enact it in our country is not in place; it will involve overhauling the entire system all the way down the line to include medical education, which is something that is often overlooked in this discussion.

How will America afford universal healthcare?

Not to give a flip answer, either, to what was a sincere question but in the shortest way I can put it:

France spends a fraction of what we do on health care, and achieves universal coverage nonetheless. In fact, they wouldn't dream of not doing so.

And here's the shocker: Health care in France is far better than in the US, in my experience, and I've lived in both for many years.

It's true that I've experienced long waits for appointments, marginal care, insane amounts of paperwork and bureaucracy that gummed things up unbearably-- but that was all in the US system.

I know it's exactly the opposite of what the right wingers swear as gospel and have convinced half the country is true, but I can only tell you from first hand experience that it's simply backwards.

So to return to my answer to you, are we that pathetic that something France pulls off, we can't accomplish? Really?

Of the two health care systems, the one we should be afraid of is our own.