Excellent post, Turkeycall.

More apologizing for the wealthy corporate interests from Ridemeron.

More to the point, we have a single payer system already in place, in fact, four of them- Medicare, Medicaid, the Veteran's Administration, and health care for Congress.

We know how to do it- a simple, well planned expansion of the current single payer systems to include all Americans would provide the greatest economies of scale, facilitate payment to hospitals and clinics, bring down costs, and more efficiently deliver health care.

I would also argue it would be budget neutral, and not result in higher taxes.

Redistribution of the federal budget could pay for socialized medicine. The pentagon is the worst offender and wastes more of our treasury than any other department. Reducing military spending and ending the now-budgeted wars would more than pay for this kind of universal coverage, cradle to grave.

We will never compete with the rest of the industrialized world again, especially in light of the developing economies of China and India in particular- what our problem is, is one of politics and lobbying influence.

Big pharma and big insurance has spent nearly a billion dollars fighting health care reform. How many people did they have to drop or deny coverage to in order to pay for this?

It's criminal the grip private enterprise has on our government. The current bill is just a very large giveaway to these corporate wealth interests. The medical mandate is especially egregious, and without a guarantee of a public option as a bare minimum, this bill will go down as yet another defeat for the interests of individual Americans.

I watch this debate with interest, as I am predicting it will be passed, which would be a bigger failure than if we left the current system to self-destruct on it's own.

America seems to have this desire to continue down painful paths toward legislation, allowing the wealth interests to seize the day, when the answers are all around us- specifically the rest of the socialized democracies of the world, which have superior health care, delivery and use of it, and greater efficiency as well.