Simple fix:

Rename common diseases.

For instance, change Coronary Artery Disease to "Coronoray Terrorist Disease." Diabetes to al-QaeDabetes, etc...

If certain unAmerican Congressmembers wants to let Terrorism and alQaeda(betes) kill more Americans, they can face the voters (or be shipped to Gitmo).

That's how you get things done in the U S of A.

Republicans, and some conservative Democrats, believe human life is sacred -- but not as sacred as the profits of their corporate johns.

During the meeting last Thursday, once the Republicans pulled out their props -- the stack of 2400 pages that makes up the bill(s) -- Obama should have had The Funeral March (you know -- Dumm dum da dumm da da da dada da dummm) played every 12 minutes to remind the Republicans that people are dying out there while the politicians posture.

The only life they care about is their political life.

To me this is a reflection of the deep moral decline in our country.

We know Republicans couldn't care less about people dying because of lack of health care. They laugh at people who have to wear their dead sister's dentures. If you don't have health insurance it's because you're inferior in some way. They brazenly place business profitability over the public good.

But we know all that. The question here is who on the left in power is going to start talking about HCR in these terms? Are we going to make a stand and pass this goddamn bill and start taking care of our own people or not? Of course, that may be a mute point as we as a nation may be past the point where an appeal to brotherhood, civility, and the common good will have any effect.

Put in other terms, if we don't do something, the cost of applesauce will skyrocket and bankrupt us.

And if the Dems don't figure out what part of "Fu#k you" they don't understand and start leading like a majority party then I don't know what will become of this country.

For people who think that the Democrats' Health Care Reform Bill will save the lives of cancer patients you are dead wrong. The bottom line is the Democrats' Health Care Reform Bill will result in more deaths, not fewer. Think about it, one of the big justifications of the Democrats' bill is to insure millions of more people at lower costs. A sane person would realize that the only way to do that is to cut back on life saving treatments that are very costly. One of Obama's chief advisers on Health Care Reform is Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel:Quote

"[S]ervices provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens [in the body politic] are not basic and should not be guaranteed."

Translation: if you are not one of the politically favored few, you don't deserve to live. Which, for families of the disabled, elderly and cancer patients ought to give just a little pause. All those developmentally disabled adults dependent on charity and/or Uncle Sam for their bed and board? 'Drop dead'. Anybody who's had enough of a stroke that they can't clearly articulate their wishes? 'Drop Dead' Dementia? Drop Dead. Mental illness? 'Drop Dead'.

Which is especially cruel, because every one of those groups I just named really does need a little extra help from government(nothing special) and support for living, and we as a nation have supported them better than anyone else. But not any more, if the President and his 'political utility' squads have their way.

Uninsured people are more likely to skip screenings and other preventive care, so their medical problems are often diagnosed later, when they are more advanced and tougher to treat.

This notion is just completely silly. As I already "explained" in detail to your rather dense President, people without insurance and people with only catastrophic insurance are the absolute best consumers of our healthcare system. They "shop around" for procedures and forego all that unnecessary testing. This is exactly what we Republicans recommend driving the rest of the market toward. That plus tort reform would completely fix the US healthcare situation.

Sincerely, Dr. John Barrasso, MD.

Did you really read that NYT article you cited, Steve. Isn't it obvious the Democrats who are not on board with passing this bill don't give a damn who lives or dies? The physician-rep they cited said he hates the current system, but it's more important to ban abortion coverage than to pass the bill.
The reality is, there is no majority in Congress for progressive change. Ever. There is one party dedicated to the status quo, and another which wants to revise the system so that organized wealth gets even more, and everyone else less. Party B always wins, because even the status quo is good for it.

Shorter Gary:

Obama wants death panels to kill grandma.....and get off my lawn.

Shorter Dr. Barraso: The only thing wrong with American Health Care is that people don't spend enough of their own money on it.

It never ceases to amaze me how the right wing, people like Gary, are so fixated on 'entitlements' and the whole idea of not wanting their efforts to benefit someone else who they perceive as not worthy.

Let me remind you Gary that the aid the welfare queens and immigrants and every other boogeyman in your arsenal (who are supposedly causing all of your problems) get from the federal government does not even equate to one one thousandth of a percentage point in comparison to the welfare that corporations and fat cat insiders of which your party is the political arm gets from the feds, i.e. the taxpayer.

You could round up 1 million of the beneficiaries of a new health care system with a public option and the money spent on them wouldn't even equal half of what some corporation gets in the form of tax breaks - in one year. Then that said company relocates offshore and hires workers for 10 cents a day, when Americans could be working those jobs. But hey, free market, right? Can't interfere with that!

You're getting hoodwinked by people laughing at you behind your back and you play right along, just like every other poor, misguided tea/nut bagger. Like P.T. Barnum once said: "There's a sucker born every minute." And Gary, you are one of them.

When the present effort fails -- and it must fail -- we'll just come back stronger, this time with single-payer.

Of course, that will be defeated, too, but it will be a much more righteous, nay, glorious, defeat. And is there anything more satisfying that that? I don't think so,

I figure that in thirty years, after two more defeats, the bill that gets defeated that time will create -- well, not actually create, but call for the creation of, but you catch my drift -- an American National Health Service, staffed by civil servants, with bricks and mortar belonging to the state.

Now losing a vote on health care reform that sweeping, that progressive, would be a real victory.

But losing that vote lies far in the future. We have to start small, by losing votes on less comprehensive plans now, and gradually increase the scale of the plans that we can't get passed.

Now people will carp, and say "What about the uninsured and uninsurable today?" That's just a lack of vision. We would of course also provide for a National Day of Commemoration for all the un- and under-insured who died in the meantime, in recognition of their completely avoidable suffering.

These great Americans doubtless realize the place their sacrifice plays in our inexorable march towards a truly optimal health care provision, and won't be resentful.

Do you think they'd like to be on a commemorative stamp? Or is something tasteful and not too showy on the Mall in Washington more appropriate?

Oops. Forgot my link. At least someone here gets it.

"Uninsured people are more likely to skip screenings and other preventive care"

Actually its worse than that. I had a lesion under my eye that just wouldn't stop slowly bleeding. After a few months I went to the doctor to get him to get it to stop. I knew it was skin cancer, he knew it was skin cancer, and after he excised what he could the biopsy showed it was skin cancer and that he didn't get it all. Although unemployed and uninsured I was able to afford the few hundred dollars it cost for the excision and pathology test but had no way to pay for the $10,000 or so it would cost to have a MOHS surgeon take care of it in the way necessary. So it sits.

I have a recurrence of a different cancer in my ear, this one a more aggressive form. It bleeds everyday too, but spreads only slowly and is not over the medium term likely to kill me. But it is there, it is the Big C, and they don't treat it in the Emergency Room. They don't even have the specialists on staff that could do the treatment. If you have early stage Alzheimer, any number of types of Cancer, or MS, or Parkinson's, or Lou Gehrigs Disease or Diabetes and don't have insurance you will go untreated until they need to put you on a ventilator or cut your gangrened feet off.

A year and a half ago I was real sick, I kind of knew it was more than just being under the weather but equally knew that I couldn't pay for the treatment of whatever it was. Until I ended up being rushed to the Emergency Room 5 pints low on blood. They poured some new blood in me, did some diagnostics that showed there was no current major trauma going on, no stomach cancer, so they released me (and ultimately wrote off my hospital bill, the whole thing 'ONLY' cost me about $3000 out of my kind of empty pockets). I am not cured, whatever caused me to bleed internally is probably still acting, and if I wanted to I could go to my own doctor tomorrow and get it checked out. Because my unemployment check is big enough to allow me to pay for preventative or diagnostic checkups. Just not big enough to allow me to do anything about what they would find.

I knew an fairly elderly couple. He was on regular dialysis and had two semi-successful hip replacements and was (and is) in a wheelchair. But was insured. She, still working in a Kentucky Fried Chicken at 60+ and worried about paying ancillary bills for her husbands care was not. She had breast cancer, knew it and kept it hidden from her husband and kids, until the day she went into the hospital. Which was three days before she died, shocking everyone.

It is not like people in the Third World don't know that they or their family member is sick, any more than they don't know their kids are going uneducated and that their family doesn't have food to eat, they know the diagnosis, they equally know they can't afford the treatment.

So the premise of this article is askew. Many uninsured and underinsured people know we are sick, in fact that is as often as not the reason we are uninsured or underinsured to start with. Those folk that say that all you need to do is go to the Emergency Room are simply ignorant. Unless you are bleeding, or have a broken bone, or need a ventilation tube stuck down your throat, or your heart is beating out of rhythm you will walk out with some good advice and maybe a prescription that you may or may not be able to fill.

That is the reality for the uninsured, we can know that we are dying and maybe even aware of the time frame and still not be able to do anything about it. So the focus of the article seems misplaced, most uninsured Americans have the ability to find out whether they have heart disease or early-onset cancer or are at risk of losing a foot to diabetes, but if you can't do a damn thing about it what is the point.

to the Neanderthal right, letting people die by the thousands when they could be easily saved with a little less callousness on their part is no big deal. But the ungestated, unborn embryo that are unwanted to begin with, but also have a high risk of falling prey to the right's callousness, i.e., premature death capping a shortened life of suffering and travail... oh heaven forbid anything happen to the embryos.

No healthcare for the struggling, the plutocrats have yachts to buy.

In other words, the GOP advocates of filibustering health care reform constitute a defacto Death Panel.

to the idiot trolls like gary out there: the best way to cure cancer, any cancer, is to catch it and treat it early. that's not going to happen if you don't have insurance in the first place. second, there are life-threatening chronic conditions that can be controlled and managed if treated on a constant but low level (and relatively cheap) approach: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes etc. that's not going to happen if you don't have insurance.

Well, I guess it's time that our gov started building gas chambers and marching the poor, and lower middle class through since that part of the population isn't worthy of health care as it appears in the eyes of a Republican.

If health care isn't passed this year, it will never be passed during my lifetime, nor my son's.

Or, let's just leave it at the staus quo, and let those who get ill just do without entirely, as long as we can work and pay a premium, we're fine, but once the problems arise, let's drop you like a hot potato and let you either starve, freeze, or die in excruciating pain, if not gas chambers how about putting "assisted suicide" back on the table?

27,500 a year is actually lower than some estimates-45,000 in a Harvard School of Public Health study.
But at least the Republican Party gets a new lease on life.

"27,500 a year is actually lower than some estimates-45,000 in a Harvard School of Public Health study."

That Harvard Study was mentioned a number of times on this site by Steve himself, but not in this post. Do we not believe that one any more?

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The Zune concentrates on being a Portable Media Player. Not a web browser. Not a game machine. Maybe in the future it'll do even better in those areas, but for now it's a fantastic way to organize and listen to your music and videos, and is without peer in that regard. The iPod's strengths are its web browsing and apps. If those sound more compelling, perhaps it is your best choice.

This is getting a bit more subjective, but I much prefer the Zune Marketplace. The interface is colorful, has more flair, and some cool features like 'Mixview' that let you quickly see related albums, songs, or other users related to what you're listening to. Clicking on one of those will center on that item, and another set of "neighbors" will come into view, allowing you to navigate around exploring by similar artists, songs, or users. Speaking of users, the Zune "Social" is also great fun, letting you find others with shared tastes and becoming friends with them. You then can listen to a playlist created based on an amalgamation of what all your friends are listening to, which is also enjoyable. Those concerned with privacy will be relieved to know you can prevent the public from seeing your personal listening habits if you so choose.

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