I'm not patient enough to get in here like my wife or Dragonrider would and argue point for point. I don't make a policy of arguing with folks who're not ever going to see things differently, and that's what a couple of you here are. Which is fine. Fortunately there is a huge country out here who've had enough experience with our current health care and insurance system to see things differently. Enough to elect a new party this year and let someone else steer for a while. I'm sure of it.

--Aside to Daihashi: Thank you for correcting your insured/uninsured facts up there. I appreciate your getting that straightened out. You throw out a lot of words and sectioned-out debate comments, but I have in at least two places noticed that it has been smokescreen talk. I suspect there are many more but that's just a hunch for now and I'm too lazy to prove it. One smokey place was in your authoritative discussion of insurance coverages up above here and in the McCain thread. The other was where you were throwing out made-up tax percentages as examples of how a Democratic tax plan couldn't work. That's all those were was fabricated percentages. I haven't found my way back to that one but I will in time. Till I do, do some reading of Hillary's health care plan, which has more detail and is probably a form of what we'll end up with after Obama works up a public plan. Have you ever heard of the Tax Policy Center and the Tax Policy Institute? You'll find real facts in those. I know you're going to want to argue back on this section and this whole post, Daihashi. But I'm not going to be debating this until you've earned a medical degree and practiced medicine for 25 years yourself. -- (end of aside)

Now back to the general argument. Till everyone here begins to have some experience of paying huge health bills or watching others at close range do so, I'm not sure the anti-Obama-healthcare arguers can ever feel differently than you do now. Every day, there are fewer and fewer Americans who can afford medical care or who are going bankrupt because they've had to get it without insurance or with insufficient coverage. They can no longer get procedures that'll save their lives, surgeries, or hospital stays or diagnostic testing that would. It's not because doctors' fees are going up, either. It's because big insurance and big hospital companies, in addition to big pharmaceutical companies, completely drive health policy in this country in a way that will drive value for their stockholders. They're raising the prices for care exorbitantly. Not doing anything to save lives. They're only saving dollars.

There's the true essence of this argument. Letting doctors and patients be able to provide/receive health care that's needed (Obama's leanings) versus bottom line big business control of that health care, which is how McCain would keep things. Every day more doctors leave their jobs for new ones or enter new lines of business because they're no longer able to support their offices and families with insurance apportioning health care the way it does. That's nuts, especially as hard we've had to work to get to where we are.

I believe we'll end up with a combination public-private health care system once this is ironed out. There'll still be employer-provided insurance for some--the upper echelon like have it now. (Just below the echelon of people who are so rich they can pay for whatever they need out of pocket.) Then there'll also be public portable tax-subsidized plan. I don't think we'll ever get to single payor health care. Perhaps I'm wrong, though.

If you're part of the we-can't-afford national health care team, you need to open your eyes a lot wider. Hell, we can't afford not to and if you think for one second that we're not already paying for it, then pull your heads out. You are. With those increased hospital costs to make up for all the unpaid and unpayable bills. With increased premiums and copayments. With our tax dollars that go to the VA and Medicare and Medicaid now, particularly to Medicaid to cover the poorest of the poor. We're covering the employed and the medically poor with our own insurance dollars and upward-spiraling fees. We're paying out the wazoo now, about 15% more each year, and it'll only continue to go up till the country crashes in this area, too.

So we can either pay for it up front, implementing cost controls, reasonable fees, and providing health care, including preventative care, to people before they're in such desperate straights that their unpaid bills just add to our tax and expense burden. Or we can continue to do it the way we're doing it now, reactively and after disastrous health circumstances have struck. That isn't working and is only making care for all of us less obtainable and more expensive. Only the rich are getting richer, and increasingly that's the only group that'll be able to obtain health care.

Will it be a hassle and an imperfect solution? Of course it will. Nothing is perfect. But it'll be better than what we have now. The Republican plan only looks at the short term, as they do with the proposed tax cuts on capital gains, proposed corporate tax cuts, too. It's true that those cuts and corporate cuts would act as a stimulus in the short term. But that's as far as it goes. Long-term, just like we're all going to have to face higher taxes long term no matter what, is a whole different ball game. We're already killing our selves with the buy-now, pay-later war. We might as well pay up front for the battle that's killing people domestically, which is our health crisis and head off the yet another deficit crisis by facing the truth now.