Reply #41: And you believe in that Utopian system?

[Oregone]

That being, 1) the government unambiguously and clearly creating law to prevent claim and care denials, and 2) the private insurance companies truly following the law and not circumventing it with loopholes to provide true coverage to all those insured?

Do you realize that if private insurers were actually honoring their policies that either 1) their profits would decrease dramatically (thereby interferring with the level of services they would offer) or 2) their premiums would have to increase dramatically to compensate for the loss. Its like putting a bunch of pigs at the trough, whove been feasting for years, on a 2000 calorie diet. And its worse considering the person to put them on a diet has been in their backpocket for that amount of time. Im cynical...because it really will not happen.

And if it did...if you could force hundreds of private insurers to play nice and adhere to strict rules about coverage, why do you need a hundred private insurers to do so? If the market is no longer a "free market" via these regulation, why pretend so that it still is free? That being, if you could really force all these companies to function in such a way, why by any means is that more effecient than a single institution doing so?

And again, I must reiterate that there will be no private insurers competing with government health care. The government system will be doomed from the getgo to be honest. The most valued contributors (those that have the greatest means to contribute for the most), will not opt into the public system, thereby stripping it of the greatest source of funding there could be. Further, more at risk people will opt in (the older and poor), which are also demographics at great risk to incur costs, so itll naturally look like a bloated government bureaucracy.

No one should pay a premium. There should be no opting in. The government alone should fund a single institution to provide universal and equal healthcare to all, which is funded by the taxpayers (and therefore proportionally more by the wealthier who can afford more easily to do so via a higher tax rate on them). That is the only way we will get health care in the US under any sort of control and care for everyone.