Can you see a trend here? In place of a private insurance market, there would begin to develop a highly centralized, government-administered, distant system of health care. With decisions made by bureaucrats, "experts," paper pushers. Start thinking of your doctor as either a public employee or someone who'll have to report to one.
Here's what some of us are looking for in a health-insurance plan: Will it allow us to choose our own doctor and our own insurance policy? Will it let those who provide our health care order the tests and treatments they consider necessary, or will it hamper them?
Do we get to consult our own physician or is our fate in the hands of Doctor Obama with his glib talk of red pills and blue pills, and how there's really no difference between them except in cost? Oh, and our president is an expert on tonsillectomies, too, and how many should be done. (When he talks medicine, he's almost as convincing as some doctors I know talking oh-so-expertly about politics.)
Another question: Will this country's great big new health-care system get all those lawyers off our doctor's back, and just let the country's physicians practice medicine? Instead of having to practice it defensively? Is there anything in this developing thousand-page mass of rules and regs that will lower the medical malpractice premiums that keep driving up the cost of health-care?
Will this bill give individuals the same tax breaks on their health insurance as businesses are now allowed? Will it let us take our insurance with us when we switch jobs or lose one? Will it encourage good health? By, say, giving discounts to those of us who don't smoke?
Meeting all these requirements would do -- for a start.
Surely no one would argue that the current (non)system of American health care is perfect. Far from it. But there is no imperfect system that, with just the right mix of government mandates and complicated reform, can't be made perfectly awful. See Britain's national health scheme.
Just remember what a good job Congress did at giving the country affordable housing through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their sub-prime loans, which brought on one heck of a sub-prime economy. And now Congress is going to make health care affordable, too. Lord help us.
Isn't it amazing, considering how sorry insurance companies are, that most of us are satisfied with the coverage we've got now?
Americans want answers, and instead we get melodrama. We get a speaker of the House calling insurance companies "villains."
Until we get some clear answers about the administration's national health insurance scheme, we're not about to let anybody pry that insurance policy out of our hands. Especially Nancy Pelosi.
But if Madam Speaker will just keep on harping, there'll be little danger of that. She's got to be the most distrusted politician in the country. And the competition for that dubious distinction is something fierce.