Just how much money does the President think we should pay as a nation for health care? Are there any limits?

All of the savings of the average Joe or Jill not in a group plan. It’s simple, really.

It’s the only sense I can make of his not going with single payer. Medicare for All would have pleased everyone but the industry, but it had the added bonus feature of killing off the industry, thus removing its power to use carrots or sticks on our Congresscritters. Instead, he chose to leave the industry, which isn’t going to like any plan he comes up with that they haven’t written anyway, with all of its carrots and sticks, and forego the opportunity to lower everyone’s premiums and get rid of most of the paperwork doctors are plagued by.

The only sense this makes is if you take him at his word that he thinks that the govt, through some combination of its direct control in the public option, and/or the indirect regulatory control it establishes over the industry insurers, can lower costs by using the leverage of the payer to enforce practices in medical care that will lower costs without compromising quality. This is the managed care ideal, and frankly, only very idealistic technocrats still believe in it. The industry pretty much tarnished the idea for the rest of us, by using it pretty frankly as ideological laundering to give frankly abusive practices some veneer of legitimacy. I guess you could still believe that, if only it were carried out by the pure of heart, managed care would be a good thing instead of a cancer, but you have to be pretty carried away by ideals to go there. Obama seems to be a fairly idealistic technocrat, God help us.

Put another way, Obama isn’t for Medicare for All because Medicare is fee-for-service, it does not use payment to control provider practice. He chose to forego all of the political advantage that could have been milked from going with Medicare for All because he thinks the industry is better, more advanced, than Medicare in this, that it practices managed care. I think that this view of the matter is what led him to say in his speech that the industry provides a useful service, God help us.

This approach, this sort of program, would be the most expensive possible, entail the least change, while unnecessarily leaving tens of millions uninsured and leave others with insurance too expensive to use and as faulty as an Edsel.

but dressed up with the prettiest rhetoric, like

“This is about America’s future, and whether we will be able to look back years from now and say that this was the moment when we met our responsibilities to our children. This was the moment when we met history’s test. And this was the moment when the United States of America renewed our capacity to do great things.”

I guess the rhetoric is all that matters to some people.

So, thanks for your consideration of my post #13, but it seems the point remains unanswered.

Here is another right as laid out in the Constitution – the right to trial by Jury.

Everybody pays in through taxes, and everyone is (theoretically) entitled to exercise this right.

Why didn’t this country try something fancy, like ‘trial insurance’ policies? So, everyone pays $300 a month to some private, for profit corporations in case they are ever entangled with the criminal justice system, and they keep the money and take out profits and dividends and corporate jets and marketing and then cover a portion of your court costs, minus a couple thousand dollars of deductible.

Sound like a good idea?

A “level playing field” is also code, reflecting Obama’s apparent commitment to insurers that any government run insurer would have a similar cost structure as the privates, except perhaps that its executives would be paid government scale instead of Wall Street scale. Hamstringing a public insurer by artificially keeping its market share low and by designing it to take over coverage for the most expensive insureds relieves the privates of any fear that it would be a true competitor.

This is a de facto commitment that the government will NOT compete with private insurers. This is an homage to the god of “private enterprise”, paid for with tax dollars – the essential tool of collective self-help that the Right begs for, but which it calls “socialism” when it goes to someone else.

This would be the same as Obama’s approach to the banksters. He (and Bush) threw unheard of amounts of tax dollars at financial (and now health insurance) predators without expecting them to change. In fact, he would do it in such a way as to assure them that they need not change, but instead will be able to solidify their private hold on systems that desperately need change.

This approach, this sort of program, would be the most expensive possible, entail the least change, while unnecessarily leaving tens of millions uninsured and leave others with insurance too expensive to use and as faulty as an Edsel. Whatever program Mr. Obama legislates, it should be the exclusive insurance available to the administration, Congress and the judiciary. It’s past time for them to eat the same sauce they’re trying to goose us with.