Not one issue discussed on today's program presents a problem in Canada, and it's time a program be devoted to comparing the health care issues being debated today in the U.S. with how those issues are addressed in Canada, which has universal health coverage, and doesn't link health insurance to employment. If you become a quadriplegic due to a car accident, and you're Canadian, you don't have to worry about exhausting a lifetime cap. There is no lifetime cap. Just health coverage. Pre-existing conditions? Not an issue. Health coverage doesn't turn off because you have an illness. Lose your job? You don't lose your health insurance. In the U.S. the single greatest cause of personal bankruptcy is the inability to pay medical bills. People lose their homes because of it. They lose their jobs, lose their health insurance, get sick, don't have enough money to pay their medical bills and they can't pay the mortgage either. Canada? Never happens. Same with a catastrophic injury that leaves you financially devastated. Doesn't happen in Canada. That doesn't mean your quality of life may not be diminished or even adversely affected financially, but the one thing you don't have to worry about is paying your medical expenses. Canadian hospitals don't have billing departments. There are no signs in their subways saying "Have a career in medical billing." There are no such jobs. It would be like having education insurance that's linked to your job where your kids get to go to elementary school for free but only if your job provides that as a benefit, and there's a deductible. Make sure you stop in the billing dept next to the principal's office before dropping your kid off. And please, no comments about how in Canada you have to wait six months to get a CAT scan for your potentially cancerous tumor. It's simply not true. Might you have to wait longer for elective surgery - get that nose job in six months rather than two? Maybe. But that's not the determinant of how you provide health care to a nation. I have several Canadian friends who are doctors and they all think the U.S. system is nuts, and of course no other industrialized country follows our system. We have the highest cost system providing the most overall mediocre care in the world. If you live around NYC and you have good health insurance, you're doing just great. You really do have access to the best. But it's time to change the debate here. The one relatively low cost medical coverage system we have in this country is actually universal care. It's called Medicare. You can only participate when you're 65 and it's an imperfect system that can still leave people with some excessive costs and it has inefficiencies, but that's partly because we've tried to merge it with the private system and guarantee a high rate of return to drug companies by not permitting negotiating lower rates on drugs, but that of course was another gift from W and his friends.

Bob from Westchester expresses the common complaint from a subscriber to a system that employs a monopoly (private care allopathic medical coverage, government managed care, makes no difference).

"Insuring" pre-existing illnesses makes what we are doing NOT INSURANCE.

"Insuring" common low cost drugs and proceedures, like contraception, drives up the costs of those items AND makes what we are doing NOT INSURANCE.

"Insuring" YOUR healthcare by having a third party purchase it for you drives up the costs of healthcare.

Solution is private healthcare accounts in which YOU, the purchaser, decides how to ration your healthcare expenses. not a government bureaucrat, and not a private insurance bureaucrat.

Romney's statement ignores the subsidies for people covered by the individual mandate under PPACA. He does that kind of thing a lot.

In my experience, dealing with United Healthcare is much much worse than dealing with any government Bureaucracy (including the IRS and Social Security). Everything from the just stupid (e.g., charging me the same deductible 3 times in one year, to the arrogant (reimbursing ma at a lower rate than my policy calls for, saying that what's in their computer trumps what's in my policy documents and Summary Plan Description), to the borderline fradulent (imposing coverage caps and limits that are hidden deep in an obscure website, with appeal only to their one-person "expert panel).

i don’t want my boss to buy my insurance from Alabama.
race to the bottom!

wow, that one too?

So Romney just wants to create another unfunded tax break? Unfunded tax breaks are just another form of pork barrel spending, because you have to borrow money to fund them. If you want to level the playing field get rid of the break all-together.

Unless I am mistaken, that clip from romney parrots one of the President's proposals, yes?

What? They are going to adhere to some of these provisions?

SOCIALISTS!!!!!! SOCIALISTS!!! Get your pitchforks, torches,tar and feathers ready! They want to institute oppressive anti- american european style SOCIALISM! Get em!

If deductions were calculated accordingly, and you could opt out of a national health care plan, why would Republicans want to take the freedom of this option away from me?

The problem is what was originally a good plan: insurance for everyone and a public option to present new competition - was hijacked by industry to get the best world for them: a government law that people have to use their product, and millions of new clients as a result.

Not surprisingly, the industry and their lobbyists figured out how to turn something potentially bad for them: lower cost potential competition from the government - into something good for them: a new subsidy sans new competition.

They won't for much longer.

Senator Jim DeMint stated last week that “multiple studies have suggested that every 1 percent increase in premiums increases the number of uninsured by approximately 200,000 to 300,000 individuals nationwide.” The slacker mandate (federally imposed coverage of “children” up to age 26 on their parents’ health-insurance policies) has raised premiums by at least 1 percent since it was enacted, DeMint adds, meaning “that hundreds of thousands of individuals have lost coverage — because they were priced out of the individual market, or because their employers decided to stop offering coverage — as a result of the new requirements.”

This is no hypothetical. No less than the Service Employees International Union Local 1199 — one of Obamacare’s biggest cheerleaders — dropped health-care coverage for children in late 2010 because of costly mandates, including, you guessed it, the slacker mandate. “Our limited resources are already stretched as far as possible,” the SEIU 1199 benefits manager wrote in a letter to more than 30,000 families, “and meeting this new requirement would be financially impossible.”

A new study by the left-leaning Commonwealth Fund that reveals that the benefits of the slacker provision have “disproportionately accrued to affluent and wealthy families.” Moreover, this unfunded mandate is fostering greater dependency — and providing employment disincentives — by encouraging high numbers of young adults to reject other forms of insurance in order to take advantage of parental coverage.

And this is just the problem with one of the mandates

The above should read:
insurance companies … will continue to adhere to some provisions of the Obama health reforms regardless of the Court's ruling, FOR NOW.