Only recently McCain had the GREAT idea of running health care like they’ve been running Wall Street. He wants everyone to pay taxes on their benefits, as well. Don’t trust this man to fix anything. He’s a lifelong deregulator who is interested in nothing but maximizing the profits of fat cat corporations. And you see where that’s gotten us. Just remember, if McCain and the Republicans had had their way, one-fourth of your Social Security would have been on that roulette table in the Wall Street casino.
“The article [written by McCain] was published in Contingencies magazine, which is produced under the auspices of the American Association of Actuaries. In it, McCain touted his plans for increasing competition in health care as one way to expand coverage and reduce costs.
“McCain wrote, ‘Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, AS WE HAVE DONE OVER THE LAST DECADE IN BANKING, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.’
“Obama, appearing at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Fla., mocked his rival for sounding out of touch at a time when Washington is moving rapidly to re-regulate the financial industry to curb the excesses that put the system into near-paralysis in the past week.
“`So let me get this straight — he wants to run health care like they’ve been running Wall Street,’ Obama told the audience. `Well, Senator, I know some folks on Main Street who aren’t going to think that’s such a good idea.’”
USE YOUR BRAIN–DON’T VOTE MCCAIN.

http://news.google.com/news?q=McCain+health+care+financial+industry&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&hl=en&sa=X&oi=news_group&resnum=1&ct=title
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/mccain-on-banking-and-health/

Right. For the first time, most of the previously uninsured people in the state have the potential to access something besides expensive emergency rooms and somehow that’s a bad thing. But notice that those with urgent care are getting in to see doctors.
It sounds like the biggest problem is that new doctors don’t want to be PCPs. But that’s was a problem *before*.

Speaking from experience, the horror stories surrounding wait times for service with universal health care are a not to be trusted or taken as the norm. I live in Canada. We have universal health care. I have never waited longer than a few days to see my primary health care provider. Just this weekend my husband cut his foot and required six stitches. We were in and out of the hospital within an hour.

Imagine the cost of doing that across the country.
Perhaps if the grass weren’t greener elsewhere …
My recent frustration is that specialists are so specialized: I had to see a dermatologist for something my ob/gyn used to treat, candida.
And getting an appointment with a dermatologist took weeks … I didn’t even wait to see a board-certified one.
In the meantime, I was very uncomfortable. The discomfort was so great that I haggled with my ob/gyn to renew my nystatin prescription, and I paid out of pocket because my insurance company refused to cover the refill.
I guess you haven’t noticed but the controls that are placed on prescription drugs by the government, doctors and insurance companies is really getting inconvenient.

And if McCain gets his way, we’ll all be taxed on current employer-paid healthcare premiums (right now both they and our own contributions are able to be tax-free). Also, there would be nothing prohibiting companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions — effectively shutting out millions of us. For many, that’s a death sentence. How one can claim to be pro-life and advocate this plan is beyond me.
I’ll take “socialized” healthcare over that any day. If the biggest problem you can point to is long waits, often for those who previously had NO insurance, you really need to re-examine your position.
Not all socialist-oriented approaches to problems are wrong. Historians generally agree that one of the greatest achievements of the last 500 years has been free public education, which is pretty much a socialist arrangement.
Call me a liberal if you want. I’m not. I’m a theologically conservative, reformed tradition Christian with a good bit of theological training. And I happen to believe tha caring for the “least of these” is a biblical mandate.

I have a not-for-profit medical provider. My wife had an accident that required seventeen hours of surgery and a two week stay in the hospital. I had cancer and received treatment in a city over a hundred miles from my home and was housed near the hospital. My daughter had to have gastric surgery while we where on vacation and the cost of her treatment was picked up without question (it was a life or death problem).
We can have a working and safe medical health program in America if we only take a hard look at how it is to be handled. The problem is that MOST HMO and private medical insurance programs are FOR PROFIT and when the money needs to be paid out, they balk. What I would like to see is that ALL medical programs be ordered to work not-for-profit.

It seems to me that our government is just fine with socializing private corporations that are complete duds after taking stupid risks and getting into big trouble, but all someone has to do is mention socializing health care and he is called a Marxist commie pinko lefty lib who wants to overthrow the government and destroy baseball, Mom, apple pie and the American way.
Why NOT socialize medicine? Do you have any idea how many gazillions of dollars we’d save eliminating the middlemen, the health insurance companies? Think of the bureaucracy THEY create and maintain. That savings alone would go a long way toward making health care more affordable for everyone.
My daughter lives in Spain and is now a legal resident eligible for health care and other benefits. Their system works very well. Their clinics are clean and efficient; she never has to wait long to see a doctor for anything. I spoke to an older woman who had to have a very serious and complex operation on her shoulder; she had a terrific surgeon and great care in the hospital. Prescription drugs are affordable. There is paid maternity leave.
We are being suckered, people. I know we are a much bigger country than any of those in Western Europe, but I refuse to believe there isn’t a way to make a single-payer system work for us. It’s the health insurance corporations and lobbyists who are feeding everyone this propaganda about how terrible all socialized medicine is, for obvious reasons. If we institute a national health care system and people want more than it provides, there’s always the option of adding private insurance policies.
Does anyone know what physicians think? I’m willing to bet the majority favors a single-payer system.

Hmm, the average wait around here is a few days at most.
Obviously there are too many sick people in Massachusetts and if they simply allowed to die off the problem should solve itself in no time.

our government is just fine with socializing private corporations
Well, right, that’s what I heard on NPR last week: we privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

So I ask: as long as we’re socializing the mortgage industry and the insurance industry and bailing out financial institutions and the like, why don’t we socialize some of the profitable industries to help pay for all this, instead of dumping it all on the backs of the taxpayers? Let’s start with health care and Big Oil.
Here’s a link to a good article on health care reform by Elizabeth Edwards.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/09/edwards_health_reform.html

At least under the *cue scary music* “Socialist” plan, everyone gets to see a doctor. If we stay with the status quo, people like you will continue to whine about high taxes paying for emergency care for those without health insurance.
Nothing is ever good enough for you people.
So some snotty suburbanites will have to wait in line like everyone else in the world. My heart fairly *bleeds* for you.

meh, well put, and good to see you show that your keyboard still works from time to time.
and for the record, unbiased analysts say that obama’s health plan is not socialist. that’s just a “scare” word that nutjobs use to describe any idea that comes from the left.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.27.6.w472/DC1 offers an unbiased and frightful view of mccain’s policy (having the net effect of higher prices and even fewer people covered than now).
the economic policy institute (http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/pm126) and tax policy center clearly explain why obama’s health insurance plan gives way more bang for the buck.
just because it’s better than mccain’s plan doesn’t make it socialized medicine, people.

I live in Massachusetts in a suburb of Boston and work in Boston. A wait of 100 days to see a doctor is simply not true based upon my experience or the people I know. Boston.com is the Boston Globe online and I swear they are writing about some other city most of the time.