- My wife is uninsurable outside of a large group plan because of an easily managed (through medication) blood condition.

- For a period of two years, my wife paid some $30/day out of pocket for a medication she needed. The same medicine is 1/3 the cost in Canada. The actual cost to insurance? $100/day.

- My employer (less than 5 employees) is uninsurable (in terms of cost, over $2k/month per person for garbage coverage some 10 years ago).

- I can’t hire anyone because I can’t offer health insurance coverage so I outsource the jobs to India.

- Our state high risk pool offers a $7,500 deductible at $300/month with a $500k max. lifetime. There are other options…that’s just the one that we considered.

I could go on and on with examples. I’m not what Obama would call the wealthiest Americans, but we get by pretty comfortably. If health care is affecting our employment and lifestyle decisions, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s doing to others who are less fortunate.

We have a couple of choices. We can become more like Canada or the UK and socialize it, or we can really let the free market work and get rid of the idiotic warranty/insurance system we run today. The article is right…Republicans need to step up to the plate and offer some solutions. All we hear is keeping the free-market status-quo in place in what is obviously not a free-market.

Why the hell should I be on the hook for paying more of the routine expenses of other people?

Just for the record, I think that our healthcare system has a problem but that it isn’t an insurance problem. Healthcare insurance is expensive because healthcare is expensive. I don’t think that healthcare costs can be brought down (without causing a public health problem) either by extending healthcare insurance to everybody—both sides of the cost equation need to be addressed. We need a substantially increased supply of healthcare as well as keeping the demand for healthcare within our means.

And no universal coverage plan will survive open borders.

Chris, you must be joking. If that’s actually your opinion, you must not only have a wonderful health insurance plan but are unaware of the most basic blight of the lower class.

And it must be the media’s collective fabrication that healthcare costs $2.3 trillion annually, mostly on treating the uninsured and chronically ill, right?

Because when you give things away for free, you increase demand without limit, which creates market distortions throughout an economy. The government underwrites almost 50% of health costs in the United States.

“Now clearly, market forces alone won’t work to insure the uninsured or bring better health care options to those whose current plans are inadequate.”

Sure they can. Look at how the cost of LASIK surgery has plummeted over the last few years. Get the government to butt out, and then the market will work like it always does– high costs bring in more suppliers who try to grab market share increasing quality and/or quantity, or doing the same thing cheaper.

Putting the uninsured on a government waiting lists is not the correct way to fix the healthcare crisis. We need to reform Medicaid along the same lines of welfare, we need remove the restrictions on HSAs, and we need change the tax policy to remove the incentives to place third parties between doctors and patients. The Democrats’ plan will turn our country into Europe, with which will virtually eliminate choice, kill innovation, drastically reduce the development of new high tech treatments and medications, and enforce the use of less technology. In short we need to preserve what is correct about American health care — the market — and reduce the monster that is causing the problem: the government.