the second thing I take issue with is saying that you cannot afford health care because you need to furnish your apt. To me that is about priorities. That would be comparable to saying I can’t afford education because I need to go to the strip club.

Anyway, just my two cents from someone sucking off the unemployment teet ;)

In most states, a single insurer dominates 80%+ of the market. That’s a sign of very unhealthy competition and, dare I say it, a monopoly. Consider that the Wastach Front’s health care system is practically owned by IHC. Sure, there’s a bunch of smaller providers and many fill happily double your premium for the, er, “privilege” of visiting an IHC facility. But is that really competition? The closest hospital for me that isn’t IHC is St. Mark’s and I’m clear down at 10600 S. Granted, St. Mark’s is an awesome facility, but the lack of geographically nearby health facilities not owned by a single company is telling.

A big problem with insurance domination is that they call the pricing shots. They continually cut the rates they will pay doctors and hospitals who, in turn, have to raise their rates for everyone without insurance to try and make up the difference and put pressure back on the insurer to not cut any further. Doctors are, in my experience, sympathetic to this problem and often offer cash discounts for patients who don’t put them through insurance hell. In all of it, we don’t have much power to demand lower costs or allow supply-and-demand to bring prices back to where they should be.

The issue I take with public option is that instead of trying to trust-bust powerful companies like IHC, it creates a new trust owned by the government designed to put the old trust out of business. I have little faith that the payment rates for doctors set by a government program will be any fairer or more equitable than those set by private insurers and you can darn near guarantee that they will not adjust for cost of living between different markets.

If you’re a business owner and your options are to pay for the public option whether you use it or not, are you really going to maintain your private insurance? My magic eight ball says that all signs point to yes.

So yes, we need to do something. Creating new government programs in the midst of high deficits and little loan money to go around when we should be bonking heads Teddy Roosevelt-style isn’t it. Cough away.