"It's not lack of health insurance. It's lack of health care."

From Bill Moyers Journal:

MARCIA ANGELL: It's not lack of health insurance. It's lack of health care. There is a difference between health insurance and health care. You can have insurance offered that is too expensive to buy or too expensive to use. What good does it do? And what happens when this occurs, is that what you see is instead of improvements, look at my state of Massachusetts.

Instead of seeing improvements, you see it shredded even further. You see more people denied access anyway. Now they're about, I think over 60 thousand people in my state who are exempted from the plan for financial hardship and this is also in the Obama plan. If you're really poor, you don't have to participate, and these are the very people who should be in a plan to cover them.

And

MARCIA ANGELL: I think in order to look at a reform and to measure a reform, you have to look at the problem it's designed to answer. You have to look at what's wrong with our system, in order to evaluate a reform. You have to ask yourself, "Why is it that we spent over twice as much per person on health care and yet don't manage to cover everyone?"

And the reason is that we have chosen, alone among all advanced countries, to leave health care to for-profit industries, to leave health care to businesses that then distribute health care as a market commodity according to the ability to pay and not according to medical need. So if you look at what's causing the problem, the causes are not being targeted in this plan. They're not being addressed.

Click here to watch or read the rest.

And that's pretty much where I stand right now on the whole health care reform debate.

The Obama plan, the Senate plan, whatever they're calling it these days, essentially keeps the whole shithouse intact, offering a few window dressings, like eliminating the "pre-existing conditions" barrier, while paying off the industry by forcing everybody to buy insurance whether they can afford it or not, with no mechanism for dealing with skyrocketing premiums. In the end, it's nothing more than a massive takeaway from citizens, a massive giveaway to already wealthy health insurance corporations.

I'd be thoroughly disgusted, but I try not to think about it too much.

In the end, the only way to fix the health care crunch is to totally scrap the entire health insurance industry, making it as illegal as cocaine and heroin. It's a parasite, draining massive amounts of resources from the health care system. It fools us into thinking there is such a thing as a health care market even though consumer incentives and motivations, and options, are utterly unlike any other market. That is, when a patient absolutely has to be treated, he can't do what consumers do in other markets. He can't use the bus instead of buying a new car. He can't go without television for awhile until he's found the right deal on a new set. He can't eat at home instead of dining in restaurants all the time. He needs health care, now, and not some replacement product, or he will die. Health care cannot be viewed as a market.

Really, the entire concept of health insurance has outlived its usefulness. Now it's simply a burden. And the weird tinkering of the Democrat controlled Congress on the issue, in lieu of actual and substantial reform, shows just how heavy a burden health insurance has become. The only solution is Medicare for everybody. The single payer system, which affords health care providers more autonomy than they have now under the yoke of their health insurance masters, and which allows patients a level of doctor choice they can only dream of today, solves all problems. No leeches sucking the blood out. Nobody dying of cancer because they couldn't afford to pay for treatment.

It's time to kill the beast. Alas, our leaders are all on its payroll.

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