So, the government would help "low income people" purchase their health insurance, like they help them with Medicaid and food stamps. But what about the rest of us? It is already well-established that Americans have a negative savings rate. Negative. So where is the money to enrich the health-care providers supposed to come from?

So much depends on the way these poll questions are worded. If they had asked whether the average single American would support being forced to cough up a couple of hundred dollars a month to purchase insurance from a for-profit health care provider, how would those people have answered?

What about the ones who would benefit from spending that money on wellness programs like fitness centers, holistic chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage? To me, that is a better way to spend money than on our current disease-based system and the accordant enormous revenues flowing to Big Pharma.

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This is just basic economics. Other things being equal, when demand rises, so does the price in a market based system. The effect is most pronounced when monopoly power is present, as is partly true of the insurance industry. Whether demand is increased by offering subsidies or by requiring purchases by those who would not voluntarily choose to buy at current or higher prices, the outcome is the same: suppliers of the service can and will charge more to provide more service to meet the increased demand unless the suppliers are regulated and not allowed to raise prices at will.

So far none of the leading presidential candidates is promoting a healthcare system that takes third party profiteers, such as insurance companies and private healthcare corporations out of the system. Nor has any leading candidate proposed regulating insurance companies to limit their ability to use their proven ability to earn excess rents by signaling one another to jack up rates faster and higher than is necessary to earn just enough profit to attract investment. Similarly, the drug companies are raking in excessive profits, often for products that were known not to be effective but which were approved and marketed with the help of gobs of cash made available by an earlier round of fat profits.

We need either a well regulated system, similar to the best of regulated utilities, or a single payer, not for profit system that is answerable to the public to get anything close to the bang for the buck, and universal access, that people in other developed countries take for granted. Forcing people to by overpriced services from corporations is the logical outcome of a fascist system in which those corporations exert more control over the political system than do individual citizens. Obama, like Clinton, and McCain, are all tools of that fascist system.

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wanna-be dictators (democrats) overwhelmingly support forcing people to do what they think is right.

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Mandating purchase of health from a private, for profit insurer does nothing to reform the system. Its time to consider a single-payer government administered plan, like the rest of the modern world.

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Why shouldn't I be able to buy into the medicare system? It's because bloated Health Insurance companies want guaranteed profits enforced at the point of a gun.

I think every person on boards of the current for-profit "Health Insurance (denial) industry" should be lined up against a wall and.....well you know the rest. These people exist to profit off the sickness and death of others while providing the least possible amount of service.

After all, isn't the mandate of of corporations to profit without concern for externalities. If the externality is your family members premature death what is it to them? They have your money already.

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Hillary has got our vote - she is the obvious choice for those of us who know how experience matters at our own workplaces, why shouldnt it matter in the Whitehouse??? Her health plan will cover several of my family who do not have health care right now, and WOULDNT have it under obama's plan. She has it well thought out, as with rejecting Farrahkan first.

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This poll limits respondents to a false choice: mandated purchase of private insurance, or not. It does not address the other choice between mandated (or voluntary) private insurance and a single-payer plan.

What is clear is that we want some sort of universal health care coverage. It is very likely that people would rather see single-payer health insurance, particularly when they realize that they would save twenty-nine point five out of the thirty percent profit and excess administrative costs private insurers charge.

If you must have private insurers involved, I like the Edwards plan, where individuals can choose to go with a private insurer or opt in to Medicare. That would quickly end the perennial but ludicrous debate over whether a product with thirty percent overhead can compete with 1/2 percent.

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Sounds like pure msm BS. I had thought better of Alternet--guess I was wrong, hah?

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I'm self-employed. In the last 20+ years, I've been both underinsured ("major medical" only) and uninsured (when my monthly premium jumped from $272 to $643 for disaster-only coverage, it was a no-brainer). As of last November, I've been covered under Massachusetts's new Commonwealth Care program. Both the cost and the coverage are utopian compared to what I had before. The only drawback is that if my income goes up about $1,000/year, I won't qualify for Commonwealth Care and I probably won't be able to find anything affordable either.

Most of my working life I've either been self-employed, worked for very small businesses, or held two or three simultaneous part-time jobs. None of them contributed to my insurance premiums, and you know what? I don't begrudge them that. None of my employers (including myself) were rolling in money. More to the point, they were all good-to-great jobs, because of the work environment, the work itself, or the significance of the work to whatever community I was living in -- and sometimes all three at once. If it hadn't been for my own good health and strong body, I wouldn't have been able to take most of these jobs. I would have had to find and keep a full-time job that offered health insurance. If you're not a nurse or a teacher and you don't want to work for a bank, such jobs are not common in my area.

The way the conservatives harp on "choice" is nauseating, but who expects anything different from them? What I wish is that liberals, progressives, feminists, and lefties would look harder at how any employer-based insurance scheme shapes our choices as individuals, as employers, as movements, and as communities. How many human energy is being squandered when people are pushed into mediocre jobs because those jobs have benefits, or into keeping jobs that have long since turned sour? How many people can't take a job with a shoestring movement organization because either they or their dependents need reliable access to health care?

The healthier you are, the more choices you have. Knowing you'll have access to care if you need it means you're free to worry about other things.

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How many of you have heard about HR676 now being proposed in the U.S. House?? None--why does that not suprize me.

On the back cover of NATION Magazine (3-10-08) is an ad being co-sponsered by the California Nurses Assn. and thre National Nurses Organizing committee to give ALL Americans the same health insurance plan enjoyed by our Congress and idiot in waiting, Dick Cheney for whom the bill is named.

In short, bypassing the money monster Insurance Industry and seriously damaging the Drug Industry. Why you will never see this ad.

This is the first time to my knowledge that someone has given to the "We the People" the means to have some influence in getting a bill that will actually benefit the all us lowlifes.

Where to start: Google CHENEYCARE.ORG, SIGN UP AND FOR ONCE ACTUALLY GET OFF YOUR DEAD ASSES AND DO SOMETHING TO HELP YOURSELVES!!

It won't happen if YOU do not participate. Obviously check it out then forward it to everyone you know. We have a chance to do something if we all act. Pass this along to other Blogs. Don't be afraid to send a C.C. to your Congressman and Senators. Crazy Carlos

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Looks pretty obvious that Alternet is joining the poll-pushers system to support whatever their position is. This time appears that their candidate of choice is Billary... I'm sure we can find plenty of 'polls' to tell us the Majority of Americans REJECT mandatory insurance.
Polls or no polls - most of us have had enough of Clinton-Bush, Bush-Clinton no matter which way you present them.

A pox on them all!

What America NEEDS is for the government to get back to being BY the People and FOR the People ---- it has been the government OF the People far too long! We might as well change the name of this country to "The United Corporations of America" and be done with it.

As far as mandating every citizen to buy insurance, why not mandate every male citizen be sterilized after fathering one child? That's not much more far-fetched..... and it would save 'squandering' government money on public welfare so they could buy more bombs to conquor more countries.

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First of all, 59% support is not an overwhelming majority. If 75% or 80% of Americans supported mandated health insurance coverage, that would be far more compelling. Clearly, a lot of people still want to retain the freedom to choose and this is an important concern. I heard some folks from the CATO institute saying that the cost born by the uninsured is quite small in the big picture. Plus, we already have Medicaid and the Children's Health Initiative. I agree that prices should come way down, that's what I think is most important.

Secondly, I do believe a majority of Americans also favor a Not-For-Profit single payer health care system which eliminates the profit-seeking health insurance industry and streamlines the bureaucracy. The greatest travesty of this year's election season is that only Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader have the guts to take this position. Both Obama and Clinton are bowing to the corporate insurance industry and their plans will stuff their pockets with increased revenue.

People are rallying around this whole obsession with universal healthcare without thinking seriously how best to achieve that goal with the least cost to the taxpayer. Why are we keeping these profit-seeking insurance companies? Neither Democratic candidate has the political courage to do what most Americans would likely prefer, that is, to get rid of the profiteering in health care and deliver affordable, universal care while preserving high quality.

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Why don't people buy insurance? Of course cost
is a factor, but so is the fact that insurance today is like shooting craps. If you actually need to use it, coverage might or might not be denied, or your premiums will be hiked beyond what you can pay, or your policy will be cancelled.

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They don't give a damn about anything but themselves!! NONE of them deserve as much as the time of day from anyone else.

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This article (and the poll it reports) seem to repeat the "health care" fallacy that is popping everywhere now. Equating private, for profit health insurance plans with "health care" is a disturbing piece of faulty framing. There is a very big difference between private health insurance and the hands on "health care" doctors, nurses, and medical facilities actually provide. Moreover, most of the health insurance solutions being proposed right now are based on an even bigger fallacy-that turning more of America's health insurance coverage over to private insurers will produce good "health
care" for more people. There's a lot of evidence that path will just make our current health insurance crisis worse, as Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the American Prospect and well-known economics journalist, has already told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now
(http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/8/examining).

For more on this subject, please see my full article, The "Health Care" Fallacy, on the Metaphor Project web site (www.metaphorproject.org) at:

[link_page_123]The "Health Care" Fallacy 2.27.08[_link]

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The problem comes from the USA spending more on lousy healthcare than the nations with national healthcare. Survey after survey comparing the medical outcomes clearly show the substandard results of dollar driven healthcare.

The fiscal black holes in healthcare are the sky high salaries for CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and their kind running hospital chains & "not-for-profit" tax-exempt healthcare organizations. Then there are the for profit insurance companies sucking billion dollar profits out of money that should go to patient care with overly complicated payment requirements and those sky high salaries again.

The only way to get our money's worth out of healthcare is to go with single payer universal healthcare and cut out all the backroom profits and multi-tier phoney pricing schemes.

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we need to get big pharma and big greed out of our health care system,
Since the Gingrich revolution we have gone from the world's best health care to the worst That will be the Bush and the Republican legacy

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...if you get really sick. The only way it pays is if you are part of a big-enough group account that the insurer does not want to lose. Even then the insurer will try to cull the "loser" from the herd if at all possible. You wouldn't believe the tactics used, but as an employer I can tell you private health insurers have NO moral compass what-so-ever. Forcing everyone to feed the beast (profit-driven health insurers) that is the problem will not solve the problem... because insurers' goals are profits, which happen to be contrary to and in direct opposition to caring for sick people (which is what people need if they get sick....care).

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Poll Smoll.

What about my poll?

It says 89% want Bush Jail and impailed. Cheney rack tied and quartered.

And Health care for every man woman and child without restrictions or

with no limitations on medical care or necessary medical services.

The other 8% only wanted free bus passes included.

2% where republicans with alheimers with no comments.

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I've not even seen a poll out side of Poland (Does it still exist?)

Ever notice any that may or not have been taken are never taken in the west, that I know of.

But too these polls are bias as hell. They only present one approach of acceptable systems that are within resasonable degrees of acceptability to the Corporate economic model of Fascism. Therefore when the statistics are accepted it is Us that chose them. Then of course they can say "it's democracy in action"!

Never will you be allowed to be influenced by (taboo word coming...) the idea of Socialized Medicine.

So unless the polls on health care SSystems teach people about the optional benefits to be had by other viable methods, you can bet the polls have been conjured up and only allowed by the SSystem.

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I realize that lately, what is considered constitutional is up for grabs. Cheesy rationalizations abound.

Still. Does the government have the right to tell citizens that they *must* expend their hard-earned money to purchase a commercial commodity? Is it constitutional?

Maybe it is, if it's defined as a (highly regressive) tax. A rather peculiar tax, mind you, one that is set by and paid directly to private corporations. No government middle man. Now that is a precedent the supercapitalists love to contemplate, isn't it?

If this flies, other corporations are going to be standing in line for their commodities to be made mandatory, too.

I can't wait to see what these do-gooders want to do to people who simply do not have the money to pay private insurers, or who refuse to pay them, on the grounds that if it's a commercial commodity, they ought to be able to decide whether to consume it or not.

Shall we criminalize refusal to pay, or sheer inability to pay? Shall we start up debtor prisons again?

This whole subject makes my skin crawl.

I'd really like to know what the hell is wrong with a single-payer system that covers everyone (leaving out vanity procedures). The argument that it will be less efficient is busted wide open by the fact that every industrialized nation on Earth has such a system except us, they're *all* much cheaper, and the quality of care rivals or exceeds ours throughout most of those nations.

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