side note: I don’t think I’ve ever read a better article on National Health Insurance and why we need it and why the righties out there, who are attacking it, once again show they don’t live in reality. These conservatives who think government can’t do anything right forget about programs such as Medicare, and our military, and the inspection of all food in this country (USDA), or making sure medications aren’t going to kill us (FDA), or the countless others that provide good, invaluable services to Americans on a daily basis.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times
At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”
It’s a funny story — but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.
And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.
The key thing you need to know about health care is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don’t know when or whether you’ll need treatment — but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor’s visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.
Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient’s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend.
And in their efforts to avoid “medical losses,” the industry term for paying medical bills, insurers spend much of the money taken in through premiums not on medical treatment, but on “underwriting” — screening out people likely to make insurance claims. In the individual insurance market, where people buy insurance directly rather than getting it through their employers, so much money goes into underwriting and other expenses that only around 70 cents of each premium dollar actually goes to care. (more…)
Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis.
RALEIGH – President Barack Obama came to North Carolina to launch a vigorous defense of his health care proposal Wednesday, saying the option of doing nothing would result in insurance premiums doubling for most Americans over the next decade.
Because the executive branch retains a stranglehold on regulations about the disclosure of classified information, there are very few ways for member of Congress who learn about objectionable, classified programs to reveal their discomfort. They can write a classified letter. They can risk prosecution by revealing the information publicly. Or they can do what a gaggle of House Democrats did yesterday: band together, suggest that the CIA misled them about a specific program, and wait for journalists to uncover the details. 
I’m getting lots of emails telling me to move on. I will. But I want to explain why I think the Palin drama is actually important. It’s not because of her: she’s a delusional, narcissistic and disturbed person who would be voted off a reality show in the first rounds. It’s because of John McCain, the Republican establishment and the mainstream media. What happened last fall was a warning sign to all of us about how corrupt and cynical the GOP, McCain and the MSM are. They colluded in such a way that this unstable, erratic, know-nothing beauty queen could actually have been president of the United States. What matters is that all those in on this scam be exposed and their way of conducting themselves be reformed until they stop risking the fate of the country and the world on their own vanities and cowardice.