I will be very surprised if the public option is not part of the final bill. And disappointed. 70% of Americans want it. If there is no public option both parties will pay with the present jokers in the congress being turned out to take jobs with insurance companies.

If you bend even steel back and forth enough times, it will break. If you tell people "the public option is dead" followed by "the public option lives" enough times you will create a break in the fabric of society, tattered though it is already. I hope 19:00 is right that we will succeed in voting out the conservative Democrats. But it is just as likely that the independents will vote for Republicans out of sheer disgust with the Democrats' inability to get anything done not only because they've been bought off by the combination of pharma, insurance companies, and hospitals but because capitalism is a religion to the Blue Dogs. Among the true believers is Barack Obama, I am truly sorry to have to say.

18:46 wrote:"It is obvious now that he never really wanted a public option, because he could easily have one if he wanted it. Let's just trash this bill, throw out every conservative Democrat we can, and pass single payer after the next election. And if Obama vetoes that bill, which he probably would, throw him out in 2012. I'm getting really, really sick of him." Finally, common sense and intelligence are spoken. I could not have stated this better. Thank you!

What kind of health care will best protect the interests of those who are well off in this country? You can pay for the best doctors and for the best medical care for yourself and your family. But is that enough? I would caution, no. That is not enough. It still leaves you at significant risk. Why? Precisely because cadillac health plans for the rich do nothing to protect the less fortunate and underprivileged. Are the rich more vulnerable or less vulnerable to a pandemic if the less privileged do not have access to health resources? The less access the poor or middle class has to health care, the less likely they will be able to get early attention to treat a pandemic disease and stem its spread. Though the un-insured and under-insured may be hit early, still the unchecked progress of disease puts all of us - including the rich - at much greater risk. Even the rich will be a significantly greater risk when the poor do not have health care, as compared to when the poor do have access to health care. Disease does not recognize class boundaries. Another consideration for the wealthy: how are your antibiotics working? Are they still effective? Will they continue to be effective? It is now well documented both in this country and in less developed countries, that if a patient needs a course of antibiotics to treat an infection, and if money is an issue, the patient will be likely to pay for the first dose but not for further doses, especially if he/she notices some improvement. This is exactly the prescription for creating “super bugs” - those infections that become resistent to drug treatment. The first dose will kill the weaker specimens of the bug, but leave “stronger” specimens. If the patient doesn't take the full course, thinking perhaps that they don't have the money and they're feeling better anyway, then the stronger bugs remain and propagate. This stronger bug spreads to another victim, and if repeated, eventually the strain becomes resistant to the antibiotic. A super bug. So by limiting or denying medication and health care resources to the disadvantaged (due to cost, misinformation, or other reasons), we are helping create super bugs. Once superbugs become prevalent, are the wealthy immune? No, not a chance. Even the wealthy will be laid low. So unless you are going to literally seal yourselves off from the rest of society, what can you do to keep healthy? You can best protect yourself and your family by guaranteeing that everyone has access to quality medical care, as a robust Public Option would. Think about it.

If the spineless Democrats to whom we the voting people gave a mandate and a super majority don't get their act together and get a public option on the table, get us REALLY out of Iraq, and get us the hell out if Afganistan, I will be voting for Ralph Nader next time. Get some nerve and do the work that we elected you for damn it!!!

If you think that the current pending congressional and senate health care bills will cure the “financial disease” of our health care system, you need to read the information below: it may move you to believe in the thesis that no legislation, regulation or cooperative measures can cure this financial disease. Not now. Not ever. Our politicians are on a wild goose chase predestined to fail. The financial disease of our health care system is most often diagnosed by the media through a simple set of observations: in 1970 expenditure on health care amounted to 7.2% of gross national product. Measurements since 1970 have revealed a steadily increasing trend in this percentage. Today it is up at 16.7%. Media pundits are generally outraged when they learn that this figure will increase to a number such as 22% by 2018. But the financial disease infecting our health care system is quite well known. It was first described in the late 1960s by famed Princeton and NYU economist William Baumol. It is named in his honor, as “Baumol’s Cost Disease” and is actually completely benign and, in truth, beneficial to our nation. It is a sign that our overall economy is performing efficiently. Baumol’s genius first insight was that one could segment labor into two classes: first the class where productivity per man hour can be increased rapidly through technological and other advances and second, the class where productivity per man hour could not be advanced rapidly or at all. Examples of the first identified labor class are people in farming industries where one worker with a combine harvester can produce as much food as 1,000 workers using ordinary tools; workers in manufacturing industries where rapid conveyor belt style product assembly enables vast price reductions in finished goods and office workers who produce, with the aid of personal computers, the same amount of work in one hour that formerly required 100 man hours. Productivity of this first labor class has been skyrocketing for decades. Examples of the second identified labor class are those professions whose work consists predominantly of personal services delivered in a one-on-one interaction with the customer or one-on-many interaction with a group of customers. Medical practitioners, teachers, barbers and symphony orchestra performers are typical members of the second identified class of workers. Unlike members of the first labor class, their hourly productivity has not increased in any large measure for decades. Baumol coupled his insight with the further observation that members of both classes of workers continue to operate in our economy and that members of the second labor class are able to command increases in wages comparable to those of the first labor class, despite their innate inability to expand and accelerate hourly productivity. Baumol reasoned that the relatively stagnant productivity of the second class, combined with increasing wages must inevitably lead to its members being able to command a larger and larger future share of the expanding gross national product. This is exactly what has happened, will happen and will continue to outrage the media pundits. The surprising thing is that very few people actually know about “Baumol’s Cost Disease” and that the few who do, appear to have no public voice. Armed with Baumol’s insights, it is easy to see why it is completely natural that the US health care industry, with its predominance of workers in the second class, will claim a progressively larger and larger share of the GNP. But this is really a good thing and to be expected in a burgeoning economy. For the US population the implication is that its members will continue to be able to purchase more goods, food and services than ever before, despite the gradual increase of the share of the health care industry in our GNP. Attempts may be made to “cure” the “disease” in our health care system by adopting methods more appropriate to a centrally planned socialist economy. One such method would be to control the incomes that can be earned by medical practitioners. Apart from generating resistance in the US population, this would merely cause existing doctors to leave the “planned” part of the health care industry to pursue more lucrative work elsewhere and cause future entrants to the medical profession to reconsider career options. Current work on bills, ideas, draft regulations and proposals for “fixing” the health care system is a distraction, likely to yield marginal benefits and lasting disasters. This will engage politicians for some time until they discover they have found another “third rail,” similar to Social Security reform. Some political lives will, no doubt, be electrocuted when the voters sense that failure in curing the “disease” of our health care system is assured and that all this effort and heated dissent was unnecessary.