Obama never supported Single payer health insurance and neither did Hillary. I thought maybe he could be pushed in that direction. We need to lobby those in congress that support it. Without moving to a single payer system, any reform is pointless.

I'm 63. Two weeks after Blue Cross increased my premiums by $200 per month to $975.00 per month, I received a computer robo call from BC, to see if I wanted to participate in town hall meetings to help Blue Cross reduce costs. I was furious.

Here's what it will take --- seriously ill people who have no coverage or inadequate coverage need to go public, and declare they will not spend money they and their families don't have. Then as the cameras roll and as journalists write, they should go public and invite the media in to record their deaths. One by one. Until this travesty is ended. How many public deaths do you think it would take?

Obama is proving to be a huge disappointment. Torture, health care, Don't ask Don't tell.

Its all quite disheartening.

Same as the old boss.

Either get a job with the government so you still get full coverage and a pension. Or, Emigrate to somewhere like Canada.

The US is a country for the wealthy by the wealthy, the middle class just get in the way. We will never have country that truly represents our needs. I'm still waiting for a politician just to come out and declare that private health insurance needs to be abolished.

Instead of setting up a single-payer plan, insurance companies will cut costs be refusing to pay for more kinds of treatment. They'll also add language to their policies forbidding customers to discuss denied claims with third parties, so that anyone who complains can get sued to kingdom come.

It's obvious that the exorbitant cost of healthcare is due to a huge useless bureaucracy of health insurance companies. They are obsolete. We can't afford to pay for them. It's the clearest example of corporate welfare. They provide no benefit other than providing employment for people who can't be productive in the 21st century.

Just like Livery Stables which died out with the growth of the automobile industry, so should health insurance companies be forced into obsolescence. We should institute a single payer system that emphasizes regular preventative care for all people 25 and under, and gradually add older segments of the population as that generation ages. Let the health insurance companies age and die off with the segments of the population that they've served so poorly.

All it does in the countries its been tried in is produce a healthier citizenary that has a lower infant mortality rate, lives longer and routinely beats the United States on virtually every single health index in existence.

I don't think I could live in such a nightmarish society. Healthly citizens? Who wants that? Less babies dying? NOBODY wants to lower infant mortality levels. Think of the children.

Better to stick with our present system.

The Congressional Incumbency Machine runs on campaign donations and it is certain Big For Profit American Pharma,HMO,Hospital and Private "for profit" Health Insurers will make sure the money they shovel into WashingtonDC's bottomless money politics does not go unnoticed or unwanted.

Universal Single Payer HealthCare represents a direct threat to the current healthcare regimes "for profit" profiles.Which clearly is why it will be resisted as ruthlessly as required to shut it out and down before any intelligent debate can be mounted in favor of it. Congress surely a hostile forum to intelligence to begin with most often as is. Craven money grubbing more in line with how American governance is conducted. Make no mistake--this is about the money to be sure.

The "HMO's" were offered up last time around as the "big solution" to cost containment and improved American healthcare.

How did that work out again?

Barack Obama rode into the WH on the hopes of many,many Americans who want out of Asia,want better,more equitable healthcare and want the Bush WH years to be undone.

Barack Obama preached he could and would do it.

More and more Barack Obama appears to have not been truthful.

That's the nice way to put it.

The more blunt way is to simply call him a Liar.

Liars tell Lies. Which more and more seems to be what President Obama has chosen to do.

It was rightly pointed out many times in the past eight years that a cabinet post of "Historian" would make a great deal of sense.

Obama's remarks that most of the world uses single payer suggests that perhaps that Secretary of History could bring the appropriate forces to bear and point out that, not only are "single payer" systems a heterogenous bunch, but that much of the world relies on Social Health Insurance systems, not Single Payer ones.

Many of the most successful health systems in Europe use the Social Health Insurance model wherein one does not pay premiums based upon ones propensity to use health care services, but based upon one's ability to pay. The logic is clear. None of us know if we or are children are going to get sick, it is quite the crap shoot or, in our case, a perverse reverse Lotto in which those with the bad fortune to get MS or ALS or Cancer might find themselves destitute, bankrupt and begging for charity care.

Social Health Insurance is predicated upon the idea, often repudiated in conservative American circles, that we are in this world, this community, our nation, together and that we should extend the Golden Rule to health care so that no person is left to go begging for health care, or go broke trying to get it.

Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, just to name a few, provide remarkably good health care to all of their citizens at a fraction of the cost that we do to provide health care to just a majority, not all, of our own citizens.

I think I might call in Uwe Reinhardt, Don Berwick, Atul Gawande, John Oberlander and Len Nichols to start. Then maybe we can decide what is off the table based upon what is known to work, rather than what we fear won't work.