There are a number of discussoins about the Obama health care proposal. Mish complains about the costs while Paul Krugman natters on about something more or less useless as usual.

What’s presumably going on here is that key interest groups have realized that health care reform is going to happen no matter what they do, and that aligning themselves with the Party of No will just deny them a seat at the table. (Republicans, after all, still denounce research into which medical procedures are effective and which are not as a dastardly plot to deprive Americans of their freedom to choose.) 

I would strongly urge the Obama administration to hang tough in the bargaining ahead. In particular, AHIP will surely try to use the good will created by its stance on cost control to kill an important part of health reform: giving Americans the choice of buying into a public insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers. The administration should not give in on this point.

Remember, this is America and let’s get some things straight. A person like me with no insurance, no retirement, no income to speak of and no connection to any ‘system’ … will never get adequate care. The ‘health’ in health care is money health, not anything else. 

The reason for this is because health care is an industry, like the old Upton Sinclair ‘The Jungle’ meat packing industry in Chicago. All that matters is the product and how much money can be extracted from it. People are dumb things like cattle to be misused for the end of making money and nothing else. 

No mon, no fun and no health care, either. In my world you either get better or die! I got the infamous Swine flu, a couple of weeks ago: a friend sez, “Go to the doctor, go to the doctor …” Why? So they can charge me three hundred dollars I don’t have to tell me I have the flu? I may be crazy but I am not an idiot.

I’ve watched my 86 year old father with Alzheimer’s receive $100,000 worth of treatments ever two months which had absolutely no affect on the course of his disease. Why? It was profitable for the hospital, the nursing home and all else in the diabolical medical food chain. At the same time, if I go to a doctor with any condition other than a knife sticking out of my chest I will get the fifteen second “take two aspirin and pay the gurl by the door a thousand bucks … thanks!” routine. How do I know … I’ve been there and done that!

To say the current system and the proposed replacement totally sucks does not do service to the term totally suck.

Nothing Obama is going to do to change the way the system malfunctions. A reason for the money- centric nature of health care is because of direct subsidies from the US government in cahoots with insurance companies and big Pharma. The government is a money whore for medical services industry via Medicare. When the government and insurance companies pay for services the costs skyrocket, it’s never their money! The effect is similar to the government’s $600 dollar toilet seat.

I can buy a toilet seat @ Home Depot for $12 and it works as well as the US’s $600 model.. Please extend the benefits of cheap toilet seats to health care!

Get rid of ALL insurances and Medicare and make doctors and hospitals compete for cash customers. I don’t know what Paul Krugman’s ivory towers use for cash, but out here in Deflation- landia most people don’t have much. If doctors and drug companies want to stay in business they will have to meet the market. This is the Walmart business model! It works! Use now vacant storefronts as clinics and offices and boarded up hospitals and let the government coordinate rather than subsidize. I am competing with the government for health care! How insane is that!

A cash system will never happen – it’s too common sense-ical, I guess I’ll just go off to a corner and die from this knife in my chest …. (thump)