You need to pull the word "comprehensive" out of the statement. "Comprehensive" is NOT affordable now nor economically sustainable.

That is why theere MUST be much more emphasis on prevention-both individual and institutional

Dr. Rick Lippin
Southampton,Pa
ralippin@aol.com

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Health insurance means sick people must "insure" to pay the insurance company "the fine" because they are sick.

Americans go abroad to seek medical treatment, what a shame. This insurance trick is so obvious, nobody will pay more stupid money for these fat-cats!

GO FOR H.R.676 ! it will happen sooner or later, even though all the evil money try to kill it, it will live sooner or later !

Health care must be a human right ! that is true !

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have to be pushed into what is a human right ... health care.

vote green.

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for every Americans, it is ever a shame to be called the richest and poorest country to live on Earth !

America is WELL OVER-QUALIFIED to obtain this OBTAINABLE SYSTEM: THE TRUE QUALITY UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE! Single payment !

What makes it seem to be "Never the dream comes true" is the cloudiness of black money that tries to blind people from the simple and everlasting beauty of DEMOCRACY !

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Single payer is the only way to go!

Along with 9 million other retired people I have a Medicare Advantage insurance policy. It has a Medicare designed appeals process to deal with insurance "denial of health care" decisions. That process is badly broken, unsupervised and the insurance company is unaccountable for even the most flagrant violations of that appeals process.

Going through that process put me in contact with a doc that does not accept insurance. His office has a staff of two people, one of them part time. All the other docs I see have large staffs of office people. I guess there are at least four per doc.

The most significant problem I see with single payer is developing some kind of system to ration health care. Sadly, but realistically some form of cost/benefit restrictions must be put into place.

Cosmetic procedures probably provide the most easily understood examples. People must pay for their own vanity stuff, but the system needs to respond generously for things like burn victims.

Since single payer is going to be something for the future, we need to immediately force accountability and aggressive supervision onto the health insurance companies.

Both accountability and supervision need to be a major part of health care reform. The loudness of insurance industry screams opposing both tells you exactly how critical they are.

In fact accountability and supervision are at the heart of the entire financial and economic disaster facing this nation.

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Single payer is the only way to go!

Along with 9 million other retired people I have a Medicare Advantage insurance policy. It has a Medicare designed appeals process to deal with insurance "denial of health care" decisions. That process is badly broken, unsupervised and the insurance company is unaccountable for even the most flagrant violations of that appeals process.

Going through that process put me in contact with a doc that does not accept insurance. His office has a staff of two people, one of them part time. All the other docs I see have large staffs of office people. I guess there are at least four per doc.

The most significant problem I see with single payer is developing some kind of system to ration health care. Sadly, but realistically some form of cost/benefit restrictions must be put into place.

Cosmetic procedures probably provide the most easily understood examples. People must pay for their own vanity stuff, but the system needs to respond generously for things like burn victims.

Since single payer is going to be something for the future, we need to immediately force accountability and aggressive supervision onto the health insurance companies.

Both accountability and supervision need to be a major part of health care reform. The loudness of insurance industry screams opposing both tells you exactly how critical they are.

In fact accountability and supervision are at the heart of the entire financial and economic disaster facing this nation.

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1. The entire "health care" system in the U.S. is a corporate, commercial enterprise driven by and controlled by the pharmaceutical and high tech medical industry. Thus, it is designed to sell the kind of treatment that makes big bucks for these folks.

2. Any "universal health care" plan that is government initiated and run will be under the thumb of the same corporate interests.

3. Other countries get good results cheap because they research and include alternative and complementary medicine under their national health plans. (There are five homeopathic hospitals in England, where health cost is $2,000 per capita vs. $7,000 here. Germany's Commission E investigated herbal and traditional remedies and covers those proved safe and effective.)

4. The best I am hoping for here, since alt med is stifled by Big Pharm, is to avoid the deadly MANDATE to buy "health insurance", under the guise of "universal care for all". What it actually would do is tax people who can't afford insurance premiums to pay them. It wouldn't GIVE most of us anything. Then, this "coverage" would be useless because the same moderate income citizens could not afford the deductibles and co-pays associated with the bottom of the line "insurance".

Where is common sense? With trillions of dollars of debt, most corporations paying no taxes, and billions of dollars going down the Iraq sewer, do you really think any U.S. president can buck the corps. and provide real health care for all?

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What we should be demanding is not just guaranteed health care for all, but high-quality health care for all.

Tens of millions of Americans already have health care that is functionally indadequate. Do we want to spread this sort of sub-standard health care to those not currently insured and then declare "mission accomplished." In fact, the likelihood is that the great majority of Americans, faced with a catastrophic medical emergency will discover that their health care is less than adequate, and certainly less than excellent.

Nor should we be talking about "affordable" health care - which is vague to the point of meaningless. What is affordable to one person is not to another. Millions will still go without health care.

Hillary's idea of mandating that everybody must buy health-care insurance was just a gimmick. Automobile insurance is mandatory, yet surveys show approximately 14% of all drivers ignore the mandate and drive illegally with no insurance.

Assuming the same figures, 14% of 300 million Americans works out to about 42 million Americans who would ignore the mandate and remain uninsured, including elderly people and children. That is no improvement over today's mess.

The only way we can fix the health care system to provide high quality health care to ALL Americans is to remove the private for-profit insurance companies from the picture entirely.

We must get rid of the 'risk-avoidance' and 'profit maximization' mentality of for-profit insurance, and return to the 'risk-sharing' or 'risk-spreading' mentality of the old days, when medical insurance companies like Blue Cross/Blue Shield were legitimate non-profit or not-for-profit companies. We will never see a transition back to that model, but we CAN embrace the model that every other modern western country has recognized as the only model that works and works well.

Government-administered, single-payer, tax-funded public health insurance for all Americans is the ONLY model we could employ that would satisfy the goals of guaranteed, universal, high-quality, and affordable insurance for all.

I don't understand the reluctance of some people to embrace this. After all, with all of the recent flooding in our nation, not even the most conservative Republican free-marketeers are complaining about the government-administered, single-payer, tax-funded flood insurance that is bailing them out. The government flood insurance program came about because private, for-profit home insurance companies were charging exhorbitant rates, refusing to insure many of the people most in need, and finding endless loopholes to keep from paying out on claims (sound familiar?).

What works for flood insurance (and federal bank and S&L insurance, among others) will also work for health insurance.

Nobody is suggesting that we embrace socialized medicine, with the government owning all of the hospitals, clinics, or pharmacies, and putting medical staff on government payrolls, as they do in England. Only that we put the health insurance that pays for our care under government control.

Although something like 67% of Americans are ready for single-payer insurance, none of the prominent candidates, including the two likely nominees, has shown the courage to call for it.

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Many in the United States hold a religious faith in the free market as the most effective way to maximize the productivity of a country and provide for all of its economic needs.

They constantly point to the Social Welfare or "Nanny State" countries, such as those in Scandinavia, as "proof" that the free market is the best economic engine.

Yet, in recent years, as the three tenets of Friedmanite free-market philosophy (deregulation, privatization, and removal of trade barriers) have been increasingly applied by the Republican and some Democratic politicians, the United States has fallen behind the so-called "Nanny States" not only in productivity, but just about every other metric of a healthy social and economic society.

The last survey I looked at showed that the five most economically productive countries in the world were Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, and Singapore. No sign of America in that list. The same countries figure at the top in life span (3 to 5.5 more years), infant mortality, public satisfaction, e-commerce, literacy, and a dozen other metrics.

The Right worships the Laffer Curve, which says that at some point, raising taxes lowers the incentive to work so much that revenues actually fall. At 0% taxes, there is no disincentive to work. At 100% taxes, there is no incentive to work. Somewhere along the line is the break-even point where the degree of the tax rate provides more disincentive to work (and therefore pay taxes) than the taxes bring into the government coffers.

The dirty little secret that the Right never mentions, however, is that several studies have shown that the break-even point is not 15% tax rates, or even 30% or 50%, but around 70%.

Any tax rates below 70% will bring in revenue without providing a significant disincentive to work. That's one reason why these countries with 50% tax rates are passing us by in productivity.

The real question we should be asking ourselves is not how much we pay in taxes, but what do we get in return from the taxes - how much we save over private costs we are now forced to pay for health care, day care, retirement, college, etc.

I would gladly pay 50% in taxes if I knew that the rewards for that taxation are that I and my family will get high-quality cradle-to-grave health care, that all of my children and their children will be guaranteed the ability to go as far in school and university as their abilities and desires will take them, without either them or myself going into massive debt to pay for it, that losing a job or a loved one will not be a catastrophic financial disaster to my family, that my retirement and that of my wife are provided for, and so on. The peace of mind alone would probably lower the stress levels of life enough to give us an extra couple of years of healthy life.

We have somehow allowed the Friedmaniacs to sell us a bill of goods about a utopian system first proposed over two centuries ago at a time when England was just beginning the conversion from an agrarian society to a primitive industrial society. The theory has never worked in real life, and can never work because it is reliant on social and business conditions and qualities of humanity that simply don't exist.

The idea that, if each individual is free to strategize for his own perceived best reward, it will somehow, magically produce not only the best result for the individual, but magically produce the best result for the community has been totally discredited through formal Game Theory since at least 1950.

Google the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons for simple examples of why libertarian individualism not only doesn't produce the best result for the community, but doesn't even benefit the individual.

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