“The federal government has made a disaster of Medicare, so why would anyone want them to manage health care!”

It is so true that we need educate the everyone in the US on what is important to ramain healthy and free from government control!

Why do we want to be like Canada and wait months or years for any type of dianostic testing because there are not enough doctors!

This plan does not address enough. Sure it helps some people, but a large minority are still stuck with major bills if they reach the doughnut hole

I said I wouldn’t respond to anecodotal evidence (although I bet there is at least one Canadian who doesn’t feel that their system sucks), but the addition of private, shared risk insurance into a system with universal healthcare is merely the market responding to consumers’ desire for variety. If people wish to pay money for added security or premier services, fantastic! Universal healthcare advocates merely want to see a basic benchmark of care and access available to each citizen.

As for universal healthcare being socialized healthcare, you are incorrect. The Clinton proposal–our last real attempt at universal healthcare–was a multi-payer system that included a variety of public and private sector funding sources. But more to the point, are you saying that universal healthcare is a bad idea, period?

Whether you believe that “think tanks” feel that universal healthcare would decrease costs or not is your business. However, it is an easy enough idea to confirm. Start with the Lewin Group findings.

I have even spoken to a person who works in the healthcare system in canada and he stated that they are trying to move towards a private system - because the universal healthcare is too taxing on the system and the service is terrible. He also stated that many canadians come to the US for their healthcare because they get far better quality. Yes, it is more expensive, but it is way better than what they are currently getting.

Another example of this is when I went to a meeting to see about pursuing a business proposal with the a state healthcare run program. It was scary to see that the people running this forecasted the system to increase to almost a 3 of the population of the total population of the city. But what was more scary was that instead of finding ways to get people off the system, they were encouraging and promoting it.

Bigger government run programs is not the answer.

By the way let’s not call it universal healthcare - call what it really is - socialized healthcare.

I can’t believe the think tanks think healthcare costs would be lower. Yeah, when you go to the doctor maybe, but I would be taxed so much I wouldn’t have any money left to go to the doctor.

I’m afraid I have to shake my head when I read the typical pot shots taken at universal health care. We don’t have it so the notion that it wouldn’t work here is speculative at best. It is undeniably true that the share of GDP that we spend on health care is considerably higher than any other industrialized nation, all of whom have some sort of universal health care access. Also, we are among the sickest people in the Western world. There are precious few indicators used in Public Health to measure the health of the citizenry that don’t tell an uncomfortable story about the state of our health care system in America. Also, even studies performed by think tanks considered conservative by many critics–I’m thinking here of the Lewin Group among others–agree that universal coverage would mean lower health care cost increases.

I would welcome any opportunity to argue the case for universal health care, however, I would appreciate anyone posting to resort to empirical methods of measurement to make their case rather than appeal to anecdotal evidence, which may be accurate and is often valuable, but is difficult to rebut since it amounts fundamentally to hearsay.