I spent four-plus years living in the Czech Republic under so-called "socialized medicine", and I would take it any day over the mess we've got here. We have insurance (lucky, I know), but we pay close to $6,000 a year for it AND we have out-of-pocket costs of $8,400 beyond that. I would have to pay a helluva lot more taxes to reach anything close to that.

I had a baby while in the Czech Republic and paid about $150--for the private room--for a 5-day stay in the hospital, which is standard. I was treated very well and wish fervently that I could go back and have any other children there as well. A friend of mine recently got a $26,000 bill for a non-complicated, vaginal birth. How is that even possible? Another friend visited the ER while having excruciating pain like what the blogger described. Her bill for four hours of care--and no more diagnosis than a prescription for Vicodin--was $10,000.

When business leaders and progressives agree on something, I think we've reached a critical mass. We need national health care now.

It has long been known that a critical element in attaining personal (not physical) intimacy is to reveal something of yourself. It can be done intentionally -- reveal something, people feel more warm towards you. Hence all the celebrity magazines proclaiming their unique interviews with the stars.

What I don't understand is that both the large business community (corporate America) and small business are not screaming for universal coverage as a way of becoming more competitive by getting the health care burden off their price structures.

I guess it's just their inherent (Republican) bias against making literally any universal good universally available. There simply is no practical argument remaining against universal coverage, only an ideological one.

Well, that and the insurers' "campaign contributions" (read: bribery) protecting their means of generating investment capital - the real purpose of insurance companies, coverage be damned.

About ten years ago, I was related a similar story about a well known anarchist in Chicago. This was a man who hated communists and communism and had a particular ill will towards Castro.

He was on vacation in Mexico, with a trip to Cuba planned, one presumes so he could see how bad things were under Communist rule and then discuss it back in Chicago. He somehow got his hand smashed on his last day in Mexico. When the doctors learned he was supposed to be going to Cuba the next day, they packed his hand in ice and told him he would get better treatment there . . . and he did . . . and he didn't have to pay for it.

He even got to meet Castro, and went on television thanking the Cuban people for saving his hand, mentioning that back in the United States, he didn't have health insurance, and probably would have lost his hand.

You can't say a bad thing about Castro or Cuba around him now.

You're getting the story 3rd hand. Take it for what it's worth.

My family and I have Alberta health care coverage, and supplemental insurance provided through my employer that costs me about $80 a month. For that, we have no co-pays, anywhere, 100% drug coverage, and a private hospital room if I need it. I have an excellent doctor in a clinic two miles from my house, and I have not had to wait more than 30 minutes to get in to see her. (I often wait less than 5 minutes.)

I left Houston early last year, where I was an EMT for four years. I remember two patients, a father and son, who had been badly beaten outside their home. We took them to a hospital where the mother said that she wanted her husband, the breadwinner, treated. She said that she could not afford to have her son looked at, and would not allow it. I could never understand how America could be so advanced in so many areas, and yet so cruel when it came to sharing the nation's wealth.

Since this is Friday personal anecdote night, and the topic is health care, I can share with you all that having an infarct ('96) (age 49, picked the wrong parents) and a quintuple bypass ('04) is a good way to make your small town, solo law practice exist for the sole purpose of generating cash for a particular health insurance carrier until you reach the shimmering (mirage?) oasis of Medicare.

If the doc's and the hospitals would have let me pay the insurance price, which by contract they can't, I could have financed the bypass with the premiums after the infarct.

For the past quarter-century, since the days of Saint Ronnie, we have let the greedy persuade us that private, for-profit corporations are lean, mean, resource-allocating machines, and that the enrichment of rich Republicans is just a necessary by-product. Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what you can do to make the rich richer. Anyone who believes this myth has never worked for a major national corporation, nor known anyone who did.

Back when Jack Kennedy was not yet mouldering in his grave, the American Medical Association fought that socialist Medicare proposal tooth and nail, but the ink was not yet dry on Lyndon Johnson's signature before they were hosting seminars on how to maximize their billing. In those days, small-town doc's earned no more than small-town barristers, and were equally likely to make house calls.

Since the opening of the public trough, the social contract of the medical profession, not to mention Big Pharma, has been: "Make me rich or I will let you suffer and die; nonnegotiable."

Here is my modest proposal.

We nationalize the health insurance and pharma industries, use their billions of profits and the hundred of millions of bonuses they pay their queen bees to reduce the national debt to China. We draft the health care professionals into the Army, give them a high GS rating, guaranteed benefits and clerical support, and no one looking over their shoulders. The good ones will not notice the difference. The employees who do the actual work won't care.

Modest enough?