I'm pro-choice.  I used to be pro-life, but after actually reading Roe v. Wade, and the cases that formed the legal foundation for it, I switched. 

I'm not an advocate of abortion per se.  My wife and I have had four children.  When my daughter got pregnant at age 18, we let her come home so we could take care of her while she took care of her child.  I'm a big fan of life.  In fact, I do think the government should promote life.  But there's a difference between attacking the conditions that make abortion attractive and forcing a woman to deliver a child she's not ready for.  I'll for promoting adoption, for healthcare reform (so that women aren't left to have a child without medical attention) and for the protection of employment rights.  Women should not be discriminated against on the basis of maternity.  Women should also have better protection from deadbeat dads.  Instead of forcing the woman to bring suit again and again and again, the government should provide guaranteed benefits to the mother and sick the IRS on the deadbeat Dad.  If he wants to stay out of jail, he can make timely payments.

What I am NOT in favor of is putting women in jail and taking licenses from doctors.  This punitive approach is barbaric and unlikely to stop abortion.  We've had Republican presidents, off and on, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush and Baby Bush.  The Republicans have never been able to overthrow Roe, even when Bush had the Supreme Court and both houses of Congress.  If the pro-lifers are really pro-life, let them put their money where their mouth is.  Otherwise, they should shut up and stop harassing pregnant women.

 "To answer Jesse's response, those are my opinions.  I am not being irresponsible for sharing my opinions.  That is a right accorded to us all.  We can all make mistakes and unfair generalizations.  Heck, just look at all the emails flying around in the last election to see evidence of that."

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Sorry Moksha I apologize. But now the excuse is that everyone else is doing it? I just thought you were better than that. Sorry again.

 Jesse F.

We have Educators Mutual, it’s a non-profit. Seems to me that all insurances companies should be run this way. Stockholders could be compensated for their holdings and then private co-operatives could be formed.  The government then could bye insurance for those who could not afford it and it could be put on a sliding scale.

There needs to be a ‘bill of rights’ to whatever they do, like the right to life!

I place Social Security as exhibit A.  To grossly paragraph what someone somewhere said--that I liked =) how's that for a reference.  More people my ageish believe that they will see a UFO before they will see a dime from Social Security.  That is certainly true in my case.  I pay it.  I am happy to take care of Grandma--I don't believe I will ever see a dime of it myself.  I am not counting on it that's for sure--and it is a shame.

I don't share the cynicism.  The problem with Social Security is not overwhelming.  It's the result of a couple of factors.  First, people are living longer.  If you lengthen the period of retirement, it will draw more from the system.  The most obvious answer is to change the age of retirement.  If 30 is the new 20, then eventually 75 will be the new 65.  It's not brain surgery.

The second factor is generational.  The Baby Boomers were an exceptionally large cohort.  Gen X was significantly smaller as was Gen Y.  The Millennials, however, are another large group, not quite as large as the Boomers but significantly larger than Gen X.  If the system is going to accommodate variations in retirement groups, basic accounting requires an adjustment.  There are going to be periods when Social Security fund will have a surplus and others when it will run into the red.  For the sake of continuity, the system will have to handle these fluctuations.  Businesses do it all the time.  Again, it's not brain surgery.

The government is worse than broke.  The government does not have 1.6 gajillion dollors--it doesn't even matter what they call those dollars any more or how many they pretend we will need to solve this problem.  They don't have it.  So why are we looking to the government to PAY for this problem?  How is the government via its broke and homeless citizens going to pay for it.

Suddenly, the government is too broke to expand medicare.  It wasn't too broke to invade the wrong country.  It wasn't too broke to bale out Wall Street.  It's never too broke to throw a billion here and another billion there.  I find this sudden interest in the national debt amazing.  We certainly hadn't had it over the last eight years.

A politician from Britain said that the British Health Cara system is the third largest employer in the WORLD!!!  I think they said the Chinese Army and some Oil company were ahead of them.  Something astronomical like 80% of the cost to run the system is administrative.  We don't need more bureaucrats on the government's payroll.  WE NEED MORE DOCTORS!!!!

I agree that the current system is not close to perfect.  However--as I have said before--the first problem is lack of doctors.  We need more.  Are there not enough people intelligent enough?  I  don't think so.  Perhaps there are not enough who can afford the schooling.  Perhaps there are fewer and fewer people that are willing to carry the constant threat of litigation on their shoulders. I don't know.  But there are first and foremost not enough people to care for the sick.  In a capitalistic system the poor get rationed out.  In a socialistic system everyone but the doctor's families get rationed out.  Either way rationing will happen because there are not enough people to provide the service.  If there are--they don't want to live in my town--and mine is not the only one.

I actually agree with your initial point: We need more doctors.

Healthcare is too expensive.  Insurance was supposed to help manage the cost, but it doesn't.  It merely creates another jungle of bureaucrats.  You pay them so they can pay the doctor.  But why not just pay the doctor yourself?  Because you can't.  Healthcare is too expensive.  So you run to insurance.  But insurance isn't designed to handle expenses that are routine.  It's designed to handle the freak, catastrophic occurrence.  Why do people get home and property coverage?  So they pay the light bill?  Hardly.  They do it because if the house burns down, they want coverage.  If there's an earthquake or a flood or some other disaster that's improbable but not impossible.  The more probable the problem, the dumber it is to pay an outside carrier to handle it.  At best, insurance becomes a way of putting an expensive occurrence on an installment plan.  But if the expense is so outrageous you can't chop it into affordable installments, you're just hoping the insurance company has some kind of voodoo magic allowing you to get $20,000 in services for $5,000 in payments.

As if.

The idea of putting the government in to do what the insurance companies can't has some merit, but not as much as striking at the heart of the problem: Healthcare is just atrociously expensive.  Government has a few advantages over private insurance.  First, because it can't redline anybody, the pool will be larger.  Second, government backs its liabilities.  People buy bonds, which don't pay very well, but at least they know they'll be repaid.  The government is less likely to default than a private insurance company.  Third, private insurance is sold for a profit, making it necessary to have a margin between what people pay and what the insurance company pays out.  Competing carriers have to maximize profits or less investors.  This is an incentive for shortchanging the public. 

One of the major differences is that with private insurance, those who can't afford coverage simply show up at the ER.  They stiff the hospital.  The hospital stiffs everybody else.  We're already paying.  The difference is that a doctor's visit is a lot less expensive than a trip to the ER.  I've been to the ER more than my share in the last two years, and what I've seen  is ridiculous.  Of all the people sitting there, waiting for attention, at least half of them could have scheduled an appointment with a doctor - if they had had insurance.  Many ERs now have to have a second tier, a kind of ER within the ER, just to provide emergency attention to people who have actual emergencies.

What the Obama administration wants to do is straight forward: expand Medicaid to cover everybody.  People who want more can buy more but there ought to be a level of protection that is unconscionable not to provide to any human being.  The military takes care of its own.  Corporations take care of their own.  As a school teacher, I get insurance coverage for myself and my family, coverage that's part of the cost of running a school district.  All across the nation, there is a crazy quilt of insurance carriers, but that safety net still leaves 50 million people caught between the cracks.  Government can step in and make sure that nobody is denied basic healthcare because of their financial circumstances.  We have public libraries, public parks, fire and police protection, public schools, et cetera.  We can do this.

But the best answer to the healthcare mess is to make healthcare less expensive.  How?  First, we need more doctors.  The system is actually working the other way.  You asked if we have so few doctors because there aren't enough smart people.  No, it's because we ration medical schooling.  In the U.S., there are fewer than 200 medical schools to provide doctors for 300 million people.  A pool of 25,000 doctors means that there's a doctor for every 12,000 people.  Now, how does one doctor treat 12,000 people?  Even if you space out the care to one visit per month, that's a thousand people per month, 250 people per week, 6.25 per hour or 1 every 9 minutes.  Can you imagine how hard it would be to provide an average of 9 minutes per month to each person in America?  That would be pretty tough if all you've got is a cough and a fever, but it certainly wouldn't work if you had something serious.

Why, in a country with more than 5,000 colleges and universities, are there fewer than 200 medical schools?  You'd think a profession whose practitioners can command top salaries would inspire tons of new programs across the U.S.  In economics, the Law of Supply says that when production yields profits, it draws new producers.  Healthcare's profits should be drawing an army of new doctors, but there's a bottleneck.  Why?  Because they're not building enough medical schools.  Why not?  The official reply is that it costs a lot to build a medical school - which is true enough - but there's more to it than that.  The medical profession doesn't want more doctors.  It thinks there are already too many of them.  It wants to suppress the supply of doctors so it can keep doctors' salaries high.  While there's no guarantee of success in any program, the chances that medical-school graduates are going to make six figures is virtually guaranteed.  Unless a doctor decides to commit his or her career to skid row or service to third-world communities, a medical degree is almost guaranteed to bring home six figures a year to a doctor who has gone through the requisite residency.

And the medical profession wants to keep it that way.  After spending so many years in training, the last thing doctors want to do is compete like everybody else.

So, while medical schools are few and far between, nursing programs have been popping up like mushrooms after a rain.  Increasingly, when you go to the doctor, you are really going to the nurse.  Receptionists do intake.  Nurses draw blood.  Doctors supervise a corral of nurses, floating from room to room, reading charts and making diagnoses.  And increasingly, the diagnosis leads to a prescription.  Doctors are just there for quality control.  Nurses are doing what doctors used to do so that doctors can manage larger clinics and take in more patients.  It's a paperwork factory.  And so, while new-and-improved methods are being used to extend the lives of these patients, the quality of the medical care may not be going up.  Today, going to the doctor is largely a conveyor-belt operation.  Patients are screened for insurance.  Underlings get the intake.  Standard CYU procedures are done to create a chart.  Doctors review the chart and diagnose a standard treatment.  Sometimes nurses perform some treatment.  Most of the time, a prescription is made, a note-to-the-employer is printed out and the patient is off to the pharmacy for something advertised on TV.

What's really expensive is healthcare that requires any real time with a doctor.  If doctors were billing by the hour, a $200,000 doctor would charge $25 for 15 minutes.  That doesn't seem unreasonable.   But that same $200,000 doctor is actually running an operation, with any number of underlings at various pay grades, running through specialized supplies and operating expensive equipment.  While patients do wait as much as an hour to see their doctor (regardless of the time on their scheduled appointment), actual face-time with a physician can be as little as five minutes or less.  If that $200,000/year doctor were charging an honest fee, that visit might cost as little as $7.  But when you clear away the cost covered by insurance, a typical doctor's appointment costs at least $100.  I know the doctor is paying for all those other healthcare professionals, but that's only so he can take in more patients and charge them (or their insurance) another $100 minimum per visit.  The amount of money taken in by the typical doctor's office, in any given weekday, should invite a hold-up by thugs with guns.  But most of the time, all the doctor will have in the till is a co-payment.  The real money is in what insurance carriers pay out to doctors.  You pay insurance; insurance pays them.

Every time there's a call for a single-payer system, conservatives scream about socialism.  We need to let the market do its thing.  But if the free market were really at work, we wouldn't have fewer than 200 medical schools and some 25,000 doctors to treat a population of 300 million.  If the market were really free to do its thing, the number of doctors would surge and prices would come down.  Would doctors lose their special status in American life?  There's already a pecking order between doctors, with general practitioners enjoying the lowest rung.  But ordinary aches and pains could be treated by a doctor who makes $200,000 per year and who charges no more than $50 per visit.  Insurance should handle the truly catastrophic, not the mundane.  I shouldn't need insurance for dealing with an optometrist any more than I need insurance to take my care in for engine repair.

If the medical and insurance professions want government to stay out, they have the power.  It's called reform.  If they reform and police themselves, government will be unnecessary.  But when industries lack either the willingness or the ability to police themselves, regulation becomes critical.  Failure to properly regulate usually leads to catastrophes mandating a bail out and maybe a government take over.  None of this is necessary but neither industry is really going to police itself unless it truly fears the power of democracy.