While most here have a position staked out regarding "the health care bill", there isn't one.

[Atticus]

And, even what has been reduced to writing is nearly 2000 pages of fairly technical "legalese". Have we all read and digested that?

I'm not yet in the "Sky is falling" group, but I do see cause for serious concern. And, it's way too early to join the "Ain't this a wonderful progressive victory" gang because all the eggs haven't hatched yet and some of them might be snakes.

So, let me ask a serious question: Do I understand correctly that, since pricing will NOT be tied to Medicare rates, only about 6 million people, most of them sicker and more expensive to treat than average, will wind up with the "public option" in the current legislation? And, will this mean that the rates for the public option will NOT be noticably cheaper than the rates of the insurance company coverage?

[Igel]

1. Of course.

It's the same with polls showing that people support "a public option". *Any* public option at all? Some specific one? If a specific one, then which one does all 60 or 70% support?

And is the specific one that those polled support the same one that's currently proposed by the House or Senate, or was it a previous edition?

Yet we have wordsmiths blithely saying that since polls show support for "a" public option that this is identical to support for "the" public option.

It's political, though, and therefore (a) the usual rules of discourse, (b) of critical thinking, and (c) of common sense not only don't necessarily hold, but you can be fairly sure that they do not and, indeed, cannot hold.