What exactly is Health Care Reform?

Nobody knows exactly the bill is nearly 3000 pages. I doubt anybody has read the whole thing and knows what is truly in it. I think it will be a disaster. We should reform the system but neither this bill or a government run system is the answer. This bill is progressing toward a government run system

Many Americans see only insurance reform in yesterday's vote. Mandating the purchase by all Americans is being challenged, and many Constitutional scholars today say it has sufficient merit to be heard by the SCOTUS. After that ruling, we may actually see some respect for bipartisan legislating, and a more humble majority, if they are still holding Office.

As you said, this bill is another bailout to AIG the major insurance provider, now own by goverment, it has nothing to do with healtcare. It is a bailout for the insurance industry.

Certainly not the abortion approved by a very slim margin of Dumbocrats. This is just another of their scams to take in more money that they can then waste on more of their pork barrel programs.

The 'health care' program will be broke (monetarily) before it comes into effect.

Everyone is guaranteed health insurance... the problem is there will be no doctors to provide health care. They will all leave their practice since they will be unable to make any money!

"I am not a Republican, but I am very curious as to why I need to pay for people that I have should not have to be force to pay for if I am not so inclined?"

You have to pay because you're a member of a community, and you draw benefits off that community. If you're particularly wealthy, then there's a good chance that you draw unfair benefits out of your community, at the expense of the people you employ, or the other people dependant on the resources/properties that you own. Thus, you are expected to pay some of that back, to redistribute the wealth more fairly.

(If you're on a low income, then you may be paying too much back. But if you're not, you have no right to complain, quite frankly.)

Some of your criticisms of the "healthcare" bill are spot-on, others seem to be influenced by conservative propaganda (disseminated by those with the money to disseminate such rubbish).

Basic nationalised healthcare works very well wherever it has been applied. I live in Australia, and the Australian system is BRILLIANT: The only areas where nationalised/socialised healthcare fails are where the government WITHDRAWS from it, as it has done with dental care.

Dental insurance in Australia is completely privatised, similar to the US with healthcare. When you compare dentist appointments in Australia with regular medical appointments, the dentist appointments are a joke. We have the nationalised/socialised system right there along with the privatised system, and i can tell you, the nationalised system is far better. It's just a fact.

No amount of screaming from some right-wing nutjob on the news can stack up against that simple fact.

I'm told the situation is similar in the UK.

Medical insurance should be a basic human right, guaranteed by the government. Under a privatised system (as in the US), money is wasted, bureaucracy is maximised, services are sub-par, and people at the bottom can miss out completely.

THAT is why genuine healthcare reform, "nationalised" or "socialised" or whatever-the-hell you want to call it, is absolutely necessary if you want to be considered a free and decent country to live in: because it is a better system, which could provide a better quality of life for everyone (not just people with shares in health insurance companies).

And, unfortunately, Obama has sold-out SO MUCH to the private insurance lobbyists, the talk radio cowards, and the Republican Party, that it looks like you'll be stuck with a sub-standard, inferior healthcare regime for a long time to come.

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Darkelfling you asked me: "How does paying for INSURANCE for an unrelated person have any affect on me? Considering my tax money will be paying insurance for some people that may never get sick and will be a waste, how is that helpful to society?"

Dude, you don't pay for public insurance that's not used!! When people make insurance claims under public healthcare, they are generally getting reimbursed (or having their doctors reimbursed) for the costs of their treatment. The reimbursement doesn't happen when they don't have any costs. You're not "buying insurance" for *anyone*, you're just allowing them to claim money back for medical treatment from the total collected for taxes. True, it needs to be budgeted for, but it's not like buying private insurance. Nobody "pays" for individual policies for all the people in the country!

To your comment that "charity is not charity if it is forced upon a person" - Public healthcare does not force anything on it's recipients. If you are covered by public healthcare, you can still choose to die if your religion requires it (or if you're just crazy), you can still choose to *not* receive medical treatment, and you can still choose to get private insurance - you just aren't FORCED to make those choices by your financial situation.

Public healthcare doesn't force any medical treatment on *anyone* who doesn't ask for it. (What do you think happens in Australia? Did you think roving bands of doctors go around forcing people to have check-ups? Did you think government agents drive around looking for anyone with a fever? I can guarantee you, that has never happened anywhere on Earth!)

All it means is that we have the choice to go to the doctor when we need to, regardless of our finances.

We are not even "over-taxed". (Australia is actually one of the least-taxed first-world countries there is, although you will always get whingers claiming the opposite. "Complaining about taxes" is a universal human trait.)

And our public system prevents insurance companies (or un-insured medical bills) from *genuinely* forcing people to refuse medical treatment. It's bizarre that anyone actually believes that public insurance takes choice away - that's simply, factually false. The private system genuinely takes people's choices away, but you never see the anti-healthcare people complaining about *that* "lack of choice."

How does it have an affect on you? Because you, and people you love, get covered if they come on hard times. Because other human beings get covered as well. Because your children and grandchildren who you've never met will be covered, even if they end up at the bottom of the social ladder.

Because living in a society where everyone around you can go to a doctor when they need to is better than living in a society where people miss out because of money. If you own a business or employ people, you benefit from healthy people being around. You benefit from healthy people contributing to the society around you - these are the people that you rely on to do all sorts of jobs that you probably don't even think about (until they're not done).

You receive massive benefits from society, MASSIVE ones, and having a society surrounding you with proper healthcare contributes to that. You wouldn't notice it unless the people around you decided to take those benefits away from you.

To some of your other points:

You said this deals with healthcare insurance, not "healthcare" itself - but healthcare insurance is how healthcare is *funded* - the two issues are the same. What is a healthcare policy, if not a decision about how medicine will be funded? The problem is, with private insurers (the people who fund it nowadays) a large amount of medical funding is siphoned away into profits and bureaucracy. To your "point 4" - don't you see how medical costs are related to health insurance? Insurance is what *pays* the medical costs. They are the same issue. (This is about funding - whether funding is provided by predatory profit-driven organisations who want to make a buck by being a middle-man between doctors and patients, or by forcing the government to pay doctors to treat you no matter who you are.)

To point 5 - you don't have a "true capitalistic society" (i think if Adam Smith was around today, they would call him a 'commie', quite frankly!), and even if you did, it would not solve the healthcare problem. There would still be people unable to afford it, no matter how cheap it got. "True capitalistic societies" inevitably create gaps between rich and poor - it's an economic fact. Poverty is an intrinsic part of "capitalism", and not just because some people are supposedly 'lazy' - but because the system itself is about accumulating wealth away from society-at-large, and into a smaller number of hands, and that generates poverty. It's economic fact, whether we like it or not. In a privatized system, there will always be those that miss out. And no insurance company is ever going to give you a policy for free - that is, *unless it is public insurance.*

And guess what? Public insurance competes with private insurance too. Public insurance would *force* them to provide some sort of value-for-money, it would *force* them to match some minimum healthcare policy standards. With public insurance around, private insurance costs would truly *have* to go down - not just in some abstract, imaginary free-market simulation, but in real life.

Think of it this way: If private insurers can't even offer good enough services to compete with some minimum standard provided by the government, then what right do they have to exist in the market at all? Let the market determine the fate of an insurance company, rather than the fate of our fellow citizen's health.

To point 6 - Most reasonable human beings have a problem with failing to "live or receive medical treatment" (and most people who choose not to receive medical treatment under the current system - leaving out religious extremists - aren't making a free choice at all; they have been FORCED into the "choice" by their situation, and to tell them "Don't worry, you are free to choose to die" - well, i'll let you imagine how incredibly reassuring that would be to such a person.)

"When is having insurance a mandatory obligation" - Was this a serious question? People get insurance because they want to be able to go see a doctor and not worry about being unable to eat that week, or being unable to afford an operation, or whatever. People die, fall further into poverty, and suffer in all kinds of fascinating ways because they lack health insurance, or because the only policy they can afford is drafted by dodgy, profit-driven people who leave out the things they need. How about creating a society where you don't need to have insurance or money to have your *medical needs* looked after?