It’s another false flag – droning on about wait times in the UK etc and ignoring the obvious fact that milllions of Americans live day to day with operable conditions but are among the have nots when it comes to access. Likewise, many millions live with unmanaged chronic and preventable conditions thanks to lack of primary care. Emergency room access is not a decent healthcare system, and in any case your system does not have the capacity to provide all elective surgery on demand.

And you failed to address the case study on the insured woman with ovarian cancer who was bankrupted, How in your reforms would this be prevented?

And you failed to address the pointy about a plethora of plans – why should vulnerable people have to cope with such life and death complexity?

This misses the point of my “symptom” metaphor. American health care cannot be fixed by some scheme to “insure all people.”

The “uninsured” are symptomatic of a larger disease, and the continued focus on that issue takes the health care debate down a time-wasting and unproductive path.

If you read this, the point will be clearer.

Reading the report you link to it seems to me the only logical conclusion is to go the whole single payer way, taxing everyone so that all put into the system. How you insure all people going in the other direction is a mystery.

Also, there’s a link to this item on a woman bankrupted by not a huge amount of money despite doing everything right. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20201807/
Here, her health insurer – a very large one – behaved badly. In a world of less regulation, surely these stories will be even more commonplace. It’s bad enough trying to shop around for house and car insurance. All you do is conjure up a nightmare world of thousands of different health plans for often vulnerable people to navigate through.