Linkmeister

1) So? None of this is an argument for the merits of this bill.
2) What is this bill, anyway? Mostly, it seems to be a huge giveaway to insurers while pretending to be reform. It combines the worst of both parties, i.e. the Democrats cravenly toeing the line of their newfound masters in finance.
3) It is also 2,000+ pages long. Have any of these people voting on it even read it?

3. Jeebus, the hangup about the number of pages in legislation is silly.

Here's a sample page: 25 lines per page, triple spaced.

2. Rates regulated by the government through the exchange.

1. 30 million of our fellow American citizens will be insured.

My sense of the Gregg nomination is that Obama was snatching up the moderate Republicans in the senate and state government (e.g. Huntsman) both to eliminate future threats in 2012 and to force the GOP even more to the right. It seems to have worked: the conservative voices in the bill came from the Democrats, not the GOP. Even though I don't think America would ever elect a Mormon, Huntsman would have been a formidable threat.

3. Jeebus, the hangup about the number of pages in legislation is silly.
Have you read any of them? Do you even know what unintended perverse effects might result, or is the only thing you care about the intent?

Steve, these alleged "reforms" have been tried out in the states and have failed to do what is claimed for them in every case. In Massachusetts, the laws have actually resulted in *fewer* people covered under insurance than when the law was passed, at great cost to the state. I could tell similar stories about Hawaii and Tennessee.

Governments just don't *do* cost containment. It's not their thing. And what we have here is principally an economic problem, caused by well-meaning but ultimately wrong-headed government interference in the health care markets. Get insurers out of the business of primary care (as it was when I was a kid), make people start having to pay out-of-pocket for their own medical expenses, with catastrophe insurance for extraordinary events like cancer. That puts insurers back in the business they know -- managing risk -- and individuals in charge of the resources they consume.

It's not like this should be news. France, to use but one example, has been pushing more and more procedures out into the realm of private insurance (i.e. you pay for it or you don't get it). Ditto for the UK's National Health. Third-party-pays systems will always collapse because there's no feedback loop to the people using the resources. That's true whether you're dealing with an insurer or a government.