Janskeet said:The crap about Obama's federal health care plan being restricted and denying coverage is a load of balonga. By making medicare accasable to all will make the insurance companies compete and will lower the cost and increase coverage.
Actually Janskeet, it does the opposite and we have Hawaii as proof. Hawaii instituted a healthcare plan where those without healthcare could get State provided care for free. The idea was that people without it would take it. What happened is that everyone started dropping their own healthcare and getting the State provided healthcare. Insurance companies can't compete with "free". They have since had to drop the State plan because so many people signed up.
We also have Canada as a prime example. By fixing medical costs, they've increased costs everywhere else. In Canada, the healthcare is great as long as you don't get sick. Prescriptions are cheap there because the government said "You can only charge this much". So now the pharmeceuticals charge more in the US in order to recoup their costs.
In Europe, they have a committee that decides if you get treatment for things like cancer or not. If you can survive for another year with treatment, you get treatment. If you can't, then you don't get treatment. I believe the cost estimate they use is $57,000. If it's going to cost more than that and you won't survive the year, then you don't get treatment. Europeans actually come to the US in droves for cancer treatments and other major surgeries because it can take months to get treatment over there.
Contrast all of that with lasik. 10 years ago lasik was thousands of dollars per eye. Today it's a few hundred. That's what happens when you have real competition.
We have seen time and time again that when the federal government gets involved, companies back out. You cannot compete with the feds since they provide it for "free" (they want to cover everyone, right?). Unfortunately, at some point, they run out of other peoples money (the feds use taxes to pay for it all) and then they start either denying coverage or just delaying it.