"The disconnect between the right's fear tactics and the public's attitudes is pretty obvious."

The disconnect between America being among the wealthiest nations in the world and the extreme risk of becoming poor due to health problems is just as obvious.

Or should be.

There is, of course, a very simple solution to the neander-con argument: If Lord Limbaugh and his diapered ditto bunglers do not want government-run health care provisions, then they should, by all means, be given every conceivable opportunity to refrain from participation. But just as he has a right to refrain from paying for my health care, then any monies garnered from me by the companies who sell their goods and services to me should be barred from being spent on advertising on his "network"....

with high unemployment and heightened fears of more "downsizings" at low, mid and high salary levels, people are more frightened about no health care than they are of government run health care.

With the stimulus bill behind us attention presumably is going to start shifting to health care and labor issues and of course they are intertwined to some degree. I expect that this is where we are going to get into the real nasty stuff, and because I deal with some friends who are still drinking the Kool-aid, I wonder if one of the Canadian readers could fill us in on the present popularity of Canada's health care system. My understanding is that there has been fighting about funding it, but has it become unpopular with Canadians?

Weekend editorials were dominated by Republican pinheads like Rep. Michael McCaul (in the Houston Chronicle) spouting off the same lies about government run healthcare supposedly contained in the stimulus package (among other lies). He repeated the same lines presented by McCaughey, Rush, Faux, etc. Do these wackjobs really believe this crap, can they even read and comprehend, or do they delight in spreading this fodder? Of course I'm smack dab in the middle of "Bush is God" country so it all goes over very well here. Someday I'm hopeful things will change.

The disconnect between the right's fear tactics and the public's attitudes is pretty obvious.

The disconnect between the public's attitudes and the courage of the Democrats to embrace the public's attitudes is pretty obvious, too -- not to mention hair-pullingly frustrating.

Anyone who has actually had to deal with private health insurance knows that the way the Republicans frame the debate -- that the choice is between a family deciding the best treatment after consulting with Marcus Welby and a faceless government bureaucrat telling the family what treatment they get -- is a blatant lie.

In the real world, the choice is whether the family's treatment decisions are made by a government bureaucrat or by a corporate bean-counter. With the government bureaucrat, if the decisions s/he makes make the public unhappy then some of them complain to their congresscritters, who in turn make things uncomfortable for the bureaucrat's boss. But the corporate bean-counter is making decisions based on rules drawn up by corporate executives, whose compensation increases as more claims are denied. If the public complains to their congresscritters, then the corporation sends a few thousand dollars in "campaign contributions" to the appropriate committee chairs and the complaints are ignored.

I've said it before -- we're not going to have significant reform in health care, banking, housing or anywhere else it's desperately needed until we get rid of the blatant bribes by adopting government financing of elections.

I think HMOs have a lot to do the the change in attitude. The last time this problem was taken up, HMOs were still fairly new, and the last, best hope of for profit health care. By now, many have had dreadful experiences with them - and those are the people lucky enough to have a health plan in the first place. HMO's are a perfect marriage of the worst features of public and private health care. It's as impersonal and beaurocratic as it is expensive.

It's no longer a matter of having some 'faceless bureaucrat' making medical decisions about your care. It's now a question of which one. One from the insurance industry over whom you have no say, or one from the government where you can at least vote for/against the person who is ultimately in charge? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

If you can trust the gummint to protect you from 'terrists'...

why not trust it with your healthcare? Mr Bush's administration may have finally painted the Republicans into a corner.

Beyond this, the Dallas Morning News noted down here how many jobs this will create in the IT sector.

Top story in the Sunday biz section.

Not news, but among industrialized countries, we're #1 in spending per capita, #1 in percentage of GDP per capita, and around #20 (or worse) in life expectancy, infant mortality, percentage of life in ill health. It would take staggering incompetence to adopt something works in 20 other countries, and still continue to do worse than all of them -- though I think our Republicans are probably capable of it.

And maybe after the last eight years folks have an idea that Big Government -- at least when it's not in the hands of Republicans -- actually functions better and more responsively than Big Business.

There is also a disconnect between what health care people think they need and what they really need, which is considerably less. This will be painful but necessary to address.

The Republican scare tactics not only represent a disconnect with public opinion but on this issue but a disconnect with the goals of the medical profession.

While Republicans falsely portray government money for information technology and to evaluate best practices as a conspiracy for the government to take control of health care decisions, in reality it is the medical profession which is supporting these measures. For example, the American College of Physicians wrote in favor of including such funding in the stimulus package:

http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=6980

If this was really a scheme for the government to tell us how to practice medicine, we would hardly be in favor of this.

In these controversies over health care, Republicans also tend to blur two important distinctions--between government involvement in financing health care and government actually making health care decisions. Few are actually advocating a government-run program and this certainly is not on the table politically. (Even advocates of a British style system might also argue the degree to which physicians or government officials make the actual health care decisions.)

While there will be a certain amount of influence on health care from who ever is paying the bills, government interference in health care decisions has been far more benign than the influence of business in recent years. At least government decisions in Medicare are based upon covering what is medically necessary, while business decisions often become biased by cost savings even if the decisions of insurance companies are not medically sound.

If you ask foreigners about their experience with public health care, here's one opinion.

Health care is an eternal pain in the ass for German politics. And there's aöways a discussion going on how to keep the costs low.

But I would take our system over the US system any time. I have hypothyroidism, nothing serious, but something that needs constant treatment - and would probably make it hard for me to find an affordable insurrance in the US.
With treatment (one pill a day) you don't even notice this affliction. Without you gain weight, become tired all day and drop out of the working force sooner or later.

I am self-employed, working 60 hours per week. No problem with sufficient health care. Impossible without sufficient treatment.

This renders the US healthcare problem not only an ethical question but an economical.

If you thought I was bad operating with doughnut grease all over my hands and drunkenly leaving a trail of cigar ashes and port bottle corks in patients' incisions, just wait until you punks see what health care run by white Anglo socialists inexplicably married to Muslims looks like.

Hey Myke K - as a nurse, I can tell you how badly we need government intervention in HC. How do you feel that you might pay $150 for a chest x-ray and your neighbor $50 only because of the differences in insurance and not the actual cost of the procedure? Then since the hospital can get away with charging $150, they will do so in all instances, especially the indigent cases since taxes will pay the $150.

There is no regulation in the above scenario.

Canadians are fiercely proud of our government-run healthcare system. There's always grumbling and hand-wringing about funding and service cuts and waiting lists for certain elective procedures. But the question is never whether the government should be involved in health care.

Obama's best argument going forward will be offering affordable health care equal to what Congress gives themselves.

Since we will likely never hear a politician complaining about their own health care...because they use it...and because we never hear of a tragedy in this system...it is a disarming argument.

It is similar to the argument against large salaries for those on Wall Street. When Wall Street complains about not being able to survive on $1/2 million, it sounds absurd.

Another idea is just medicare for all. There are millions of seniors on medicare. We know how it works, we know the overhead costs. And if everyone gets a chance to opt-in to medicare, prices will go down and support will go up.

A poll by the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Harris Interactive exactly a year ago showed that "[a]mong those who say they have at least some understanding of the phrase ["socialized medicine"] (82%), a plurality (45%) says such a system would be better [than the current system] while 39 percent say it would be worse. Twelve percent say they do not know and four percent say about the same" (h/t to Chris Bowers here). That's not just a question about the "federal government providing national health insurance," as in the CBS/NYT poll, that's about the dreaded "socialized medicine" asked about with that specific term. The term "socialized medicine" has lost a lot of its (unwarranted) emotive power when 49% of Americans think it would be better than or as good as the health care "system" we have now.

The retrograde Republicans, of course, are locked into their age-old memes (c. 1933) and appeal to their (ever-shrinking) base.

At this point, in the race between which is more broken—our political system or our health care "system"—the latter gaining on, if not overtaking, the former. Things can't continue as they are. If the Obama administration put its weight behind a single-payer health care system (as yet, still unlikely—but a good idea in the current economic crisis), that and growing public support would greatly increase the chances of that system becoming a reality in the near future in the US.

Think about it a minute. The same type of individual who ran the banking industry into the ground for their own personal aggrandizement is also running the private medical insurance business. Indeed, in some cases (AIG and others) it is the same person. Now would you prefer someone like that controlling your medical insurance? Remember that each dime they pay your medical provider is a dime out of their pockets and you have seen how they feel about giving up anything.

Frankly I would much rather have a disinterested government bureaucrat deciding on whether to pay my health providers than someone whose bonus and continued employment depend on rejecting my claims.

You write: "Last week's conservative meme ... was also intended to play on alleged fears of "government-run healthcare."

What about "insurance-run healthcare"? I have two friends who have recently been dealing with prolonged healthcare issues. In both cases, it was the insurance companies, not the doctors, who were making the decisions. Both went through a long sequence of get a test, wait for results, get another test, wait for results, etc. From what I could gather, the sequence of testing and the timing was dictated by the insurer. Specific instances of clerical and/or doctor frustration were related to me. And don't even talk about billing. No one I know can make any sense of the figures appearing on the mailings they get from private insurers and medical offices. However, all we hear about from Rush and the right-wing crazies is about the evils of "government-run healthcare."

Any conservative going on about the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship doesn't know what he or she is talking about.

The well-being of more and more Americans is not in the hands of medical professionals, not in the hands of well-meaning government bureaucrats; it is, instead, in the hands of profit-maximizing, bonus-seeking, job-loss-fearing corporate lackeys.

But it's not socialism. So be happy.

Two questions: Why don't American businesses take the lead in getting out of the health-insurance racket (conservatives should be leading the charge to get this burden off the backs of US companies!), and why don't doctors and nurses take the lead in bringing about a system that would allow them to focus on wellness and healing?

It's obvious to everyone but movement conservatives, whose entire belief system is based on fantasy, that decades of experience with private health insurers -- whose bureaucrats have an economic incentive to interfere in the doctor-patient relationship, or at the very least refuse to provide the service they're supposedly paid to do -- has led the American people to conclude that government funded health care couldn't suck any worse.

(Remember, it isn't government "run", it's government funded -- but that dishonest term conservatives deploy is quite revealing! Conservatives don't really mind government running health care -- no one is advocating doing away with the VA, for example -- they mind paying more in taxes for it, even if it's for a vastly better system.)

By the way, "Myke K" is a parody of one of our more delusional conservative trolls. This has been a public service announcement.

Why don't American businesses take the lead in getting out of the health-insurance racket (conservatives should be leading the charge to get this burden off the backs of US companies!)

This is really the big question that needs to be answered. If I were a tinfoil hat type, I might theorize that business voluntarily submitting to crushing healthcare costs when it logically should be pushing for reform comes out of a desire to sharply rein in worker mobility. Good employees who might otherwise bolt will put up with a great deal from their employers if that's the only way their families can get health insurance.

why don't doctors and nurses take the lead in bringing about a system that would allow them to focus on wellness and healing?

Increasingly, they are. There's been a significant shift in healthcare provider opinion on this topic over the past few years. I'm in a hurry right now but will try to find some data later.

I have lived half my life in England and Europe, where the have National Health Care, I had wonderful care, my husband an American suffered an annurism of the aorta while in England, had specialist care, round the clock nursing in intensive care and was in hospital for quite awhile, had great aftercare.The most wonderful thing, no one ever mentioned payment for services, as they don't for anyone who has been in England for a year. Now in this universe, we suffer health insurance companies, who read us the rules of what they will or won't pay for etc, here the insurance companies dictate whether we get care or not - it is a nightmare, Europeans would never tolerate these conditions.

Thanks for the update Lindsay--your sentiments are consistent with my understanding, but that will not quiet the right wing types. Here are the basic talking points. The government will ration health care. As noted that is what insurance companies do now with 47 million self rationing because they have no insurance. The government will set up all kinds of requirements before you can get care. The legend? in this regard is that in England if you had macular degeneration you could not get treatment until you were blind in one eye. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but because we spend about twice as much per capita as England, I assume the government could afford to treat macular degenration twice as as early as England. If the government contains costs--as only the government really can do- it will stifle innovation by Big Pharma and medical device manufacturers. Of course it will also lead us to stop wasting our money on drugs that do not work or cause more harm than good. Finally, we will face even greater shortages of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals. Basically on this one I think it would be better if health care professionals were less obsessed with profit and if we opened up the business to individuals who while perhaps not as talented as today's students were more interested in treating people and less interested in making a pile of money.

I think one important reason why the public is more favorable toward government-run health care is that we've had 40-odd years of experience with Medicare, which generally works pretty well (at least for patients; it could be better for providers, but providers aren't that big a fraction of the populace). Also, private insurance has been getting worse and worse, and is highly likely to get yet worse again with the economy where it is now. So people aren't that worried about losing the latter in favor of a form of the former.

Finally, we will face even greater shortages of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals. Basically on this one I think it would be better if health care professionals were less obsessed with profit[...] -- Terry

You're behind the times on that one. As shortstop said, there's more and more push from the medical profession for a unified, single "plan" (ie govt administered heal insurance). Not many doctors are making piles of money an more (if they ever did). From what I've seen, they're told by the insurers how much they can charge (ie how much they'll get reimbursed). And, they have to hire extra personnel just to harass the insurers into disgorging what's owed. As a result, the more "plans" a doctor accepts, the higher his overhead: he has to hire more administrative personnel, needs a bigger office, etc, etc, etc.

A friend of mine recently changed her "plan" (ie her husband''s workplace switched to a new one, to cut down on costs) and it was to one which her old doctor did not accept. Since she had been very happy with the doctor, she decided to stay with him and pay him in full. And found that her payment-in-full was not all that much higher than her co-payment had been, under the old plan.

It's not the doctors' greed that's driving the costs up; it's the insurance providers'.