I still remain opposed to the entire scheme.

Corporate and Government are two sides of the same nannyism coin. Neither can be expected to solve anything for us.

But to the degree that either is allowed a brief or responsibility...
make it a narrowly focused one.

there are three basic levels/categories of care:
1) the 80% that constitutes everyone's day to day uses which should be paid for out of pocket (by most of us) on a fee for service basis to the provider we choose. (and yes, people with some conditions can expect to pay more for that basic care than people who don't have those conditions.)

2) the 10 % that will occasionally crop up beyond those routine year to year expenses that we can mitigate the budget impact of by having some back stop insurance (or an HSA) which we also pay for on our own and most will use very similarly to how we use our homeowner or auto insurance.

3) The 10% that NO ONE can reasonably expect to afford or in most instance to even insure against privately. These catastrophic and traumatic bankrupting expenses are the perfect category for and reasonable limit to a government plan with a tax supported 100% actuarial base.

If we are willing to be truly honest we can add a fourth category:
4) Stop pretending that anyone gets out alive by refusing to flog and abuse our elderly loved ones and call it medicine.

We can make it more complicated but there is no reason to.

One does not need to know anything about health care and only a little about the history of massive government programs to know the best vote both politically and economically is "NO".

People keep referring to 1 / 6 of economy going to health insurance. Is that better or worse than 100 of the federal budget going to pay interest on dept? I would like someone explain to me how it's the federal government job to provide for the individual or to require the individual to pay for someone else. We listened to congress talk for many year of having to make tough choices concerning SS and medicare, suddenly that not the topic when another bankrupt federal program is wanted. And where is all the openness promises made before the last election. Can any citizen get a copy of the purposed bill ?

As if Paul Krugman -- former adviser to Enron, who was writing articles about Enron while advising them -- should be trusted.

Why? Because he writes for the New York Times?

Kratovil isn't being wimpy. He's actually listening to his constituents. Unlike the Tribune papers like The Sun, which are in dire straits for failing to listen to their customers.

Poor Frank Kratovil. He was elected in a Republican district , after the incumbent was booted out by an almost-popular conservative. Now he is faced with a decisive vote on the future of health care policy.
If he believes that the status quo is fine, he should vote with the Republicans. Maybe they will adopt him.
If he believes that health care policy should be changed, he should vote with the Democrats. Perhaps he will be rewarded by the leadership.
If he has no beliefs, maybe he should not be in the U.S. Congress. Or maybe if he is ready to sell his vote to the highest bidder, Congress is exactly where he belongs.

The comment by "MrRational" is worthwhile, although I have no particular use for the idea that we cannot take care of the poor, especially the children in this condition, who need basic medical services but who cannot afford to have them on a readily available basis. As a quite affluent society, we can surely afford to take care of people whose earnings make keeping body and soul together a challenge, and those people will number in the many millions, even in an industrialized society such as ours so long as we choose a form of economic organization where there are winners and losers, as well as stark differences in the long-term, even inter-generational fortunes of those two groups.

It is most unfortunate that a "progressively conservative" approach to reform was never in the cards for the debate in Washington; however, as a purely academic exercise, I note three major points that are missing in Mr. Rational's comment.

First and foremost is the matter of price transparency. Doctors, medical centers, and hospitals all hide their prices, which thwarts the very foundation of competition that would cabin those prices within an envelope formed by profitability and affordability. As a professor, I make a big issue of this. Price transparency is crucial if the demand and supply sides are to discover prices that clear markets efficiently; but no serious federal or state proposals have been fielded to mandate publicly available price disclosures for a standard list of medical services and treatments.

Second — and this point goes far, far beyond the health care industry — we are using antitrust laws written in the first half of the 20th Century to deal with markets of the 21st Century and the market power of concentrated industries in an age where "deregulation" has allowed the argument for scale economies to sway regulatory oversight despite overwhelmingly larger, social and economic interests that are harmed by compacted industries. The Federal Trade Commission frets about "unfair and deceptive" advertising, it uses antiquated metrics like the HHI to measure market concentration, and it chases market concentrators after they've become too large to bust (as in the case of Microsoft, and as in the case now of Google).

Third, and finally, the rampant lack of education in basics of economics and business allows far too many people to get by with no understanding of such concepts as "moral hazard" and "adverse selection." This ensures a debate where only Right-wing conservatives bring up these ideas, and usually in offensive ways, making the underlying concepts as loathsome as everything else Right-wing conservatives talk about. If we are to have a truly informed debate, it would be so much better if the dancing, naked clowns of the Right (as I've called them in my writings) would shut up so the legitimate points they are mimicking could be brought up by people who aren't dancing, naked clowns.

Unfortunately, as it now stands, the only health care "reform" being discussed is really just health care repair, and it's sloppy repair done by self-serving politicians. Some things never change.

That's politics.

Dark Wraith, Thanks for the mention.

These are blog comments and in my view this is not the venue for an extensively detailed treatise on any topic; consequently all manner of specific detail needs to be glossed over or even not mentioned at all in comments; much as I suspect this comment will neglect some detail you or another may want to see addressed.

But if you read through my comment again you will see that I didn't forget children or the poor or the elderly or veterans or active duty military. I just didn't mention any of them because none are affected by the current scheme nor would they be affected by the proposed 'reform" or by my own approach.

Look for: "should be paid for out of pocket (by most of us)" . The phrase "most of us" represents the approximately 180 million affected by "reform".

I agree entirely that those unable to fend for themselves are worthy of help and that we collectively have the obligation to offer that help.