All the pension plans, 401ks, etc. would be decimated.  So it's okay, to you, for the government to destroy the retirement funds of the poor and middle class?  The rich would shrug it off, take a deduction and make more money.  The poor and middle class couldn't do that."

Ah, so you're saying that no matter how costly, inefficient and detrimental to the health of the citizenry, the private health insurance industry must be sustained so that its investors may continue to profit by providing an inferior service at the potential cost of human lives?

See what I did there? I contrasted the loss of pensions with the loss of human lives. Which is what we're talking about when we're discussing which health care plan is better and covers more people. A fully government financed plan would have to cover 100 percent of the people. The current privately financed plan does not.

Now, bear in mind that I only advocate shifting to a government system if the proposed government system has a credible plan for providing better or more comprehensive service while the private system does not. All things being equal, the existing system would take precedence.

Change You Can Believe In

Once I had to go to an eye doctor and be tortured with bright light and radioactive substances  (well I supposed really they put a radioactive dye into my vein and took pictures of the back of my eye which was damned light sensistive at the time) due to a moderate to sever case of maculitis. This ended with a SHOT (of cortizone) IN MY EYE! When I called they scheduled me to come in at the end of the week but mentioned that my referring eye doctor suspected I had maculitis I was bumped up to "ooh....maculitis? Oh geez. How soon can you get here? " I was there by Nine AM.

It cost me $600 and I had no insurance that would pay it. The "insurance lady" at HR (in Michigan), from my job told me to mail it in but they'd probably reject it since the guy was an out of system specialist who was not himself referred by an in system doctor. They warned me not to have the doctor process the insurance but to seek reinbursement and Marsha, the warehouse supervisor locally said she could cut me an advance or take up a collection. I told her that I had money in the bank but thanks anyway.

When my ordel was over, I wrote the doctor a check and the lady at the front desk didn't seem to know what to do with it. In fact she looked sort of confused and upset. She was clearly expecting an insurance card and was not really too familar with plan B.

The doctor's office called me up the following week and told me that they were looking to charge me $170 dollars instead and planned to return the rest of the $600 or set it up as a credit against further treatement if I preferred. Now I don't know if they got a clinical social worker involved to hook them up with some donation funding to knock to price down, or if the doctor just personally decided to cut me a break and charge me some base cost figure, or if there are two parallel pricing structures, one of which is inflated as a negotiating tactic against insurance companies and the other which is customer/patient oriented.

It was weird. (And yes, I realize that this is anecdotal. Anecdotes often are.)