[QUOTE=TENAC;331913]I got my facts same place you got yours.....[/QUOTE]

With all due respect, you don't always deal WITH "facts". What you posted in #404 is not true.

I, too, must disagree with your equation of people needing to wait in line and people who do not have (or are refused) medical insurance AND/OR medical treatments.

You also chose to ignore the specific examples I/we have given. My husband went in to the hospital to get his leg X-ray'd at 3:30pm. He was seen at 4pm, and was in the operating room at 7pm. This pretty much describes the average hospital experience that I've seen all my life.

Of course some procedures do have a longer wait time - not every community has trained, qualified physicians/surgeons of every stripe (that's not possible) - but ALL on any waiting lists are seen, in order, based on severity of need (i.e. life and death cases do get seen ASAP). We do not routinely deny medical treatment of ANY kind to 15-20% of the population. Nor do they in Cuba.

[QUOTE=ptbc;335036]Interesting point made by a writer for "The New Republic" today: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html? … 5218063a33

[COLOR="Red"]Mack the Quack[/COLOR] by Jonathan Cohn
The disaster that is McCain's health policy.
Post Date Wednesday, March 12, 2008

[COLOR="Blue"]McCain, of all people, should be sensitive to the way America's health care system fails some of its most vulnerable citizens. He is a three-time survivor of melanoma, the potentially deadly skin cancer. Although he was last treated for cancer six years ago--and although he takes all the right precautions, dutifully donning sunscreen whenever he's outside--he's still at a higher-than-normal risk of getting cancer again.

This sort of history doesn't seriously affect people who get their insurance from big-time employers. In any large organization of relatively random people--say, the employees of the federal government, of which McCain happens to be one--insurers know that most of the people will be healthy, which means premiums from those folks will be sufficient to cover the relatively few with serious medical problems.

But if McCain were, hypothetically, to shop for insurance on his own, he would discover that insurers were far less accommodating. Cancer, even one in remission, would qualify as one of those infamous "preexisting conditions." The insurers might offer him an exorbitantly priced policy or exclude coverage of anything related to cancer. Or they simply might refuse him coverage outright.[/COLOR]

Yep. He get smacked with the dreaded " preexisting condition " label, the modern incarnation of leprosy.

You can read through the rest of the article at the link but the ending point is this, which I would love to see the Democratic nominee challenge him with (emphasis mine) :

[COLOR="Blue"]For McCain, these steps apparently go too far in the direction of government-regulated health care. But perhaps McCain should consider his own experience. After the war, McCain would have been eligible for medical care from the Veterans Administration. As a member of Congress, he can get insurance through the federal employees' plan; when he turned 65, he became eligible for Medicare. It may have escaped McCain's notice, but those are all government programs. And, if that care is good enough for him, then why not everybody else?[/COLOR][/QUOTE]
It's also good enough for a Troops apparently too.