Anyway, sticking to facts is always great. So, if you’re going to make a sweeping assertion that single payer isn’t possible in the U.S. or that some other system is better, please, lay out some arguments and facts. Sources would be nice too.

And to Supremacy Claus, your comments have no basis in reality. In a single payer system, doctors go home at 5 p.m. “come hell or high water”? really? There’s much out there to refute you, but here’s one: http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Health/Electronic-health-records-after-hours-care-lag-in-US-primary-care-practices.html

An abstract of an article published by the AMA states:
“A study reveals that the United States lags behind other developed nations including the Netherlands and Australia in using electronic health records and providing after-hours care, especially in the primary care setting.”

The current system(and extensions thereof) is a huge drag on business, sucking significant dollars from reinvestment, growth, and profitability.

Your opposition to single-payer healthcare seems uninformed by fact. Why are you so opposed to it?

WE JUST HAD A GIANT EXAMPLE OF GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE TRYING TO SCREW PHYSICIANS.

Seriously. How on god’s green earth can these people want the government to completely take over health care after this latest fiasco? The _only_ stick doctors had was dropping Medicare. And PNHP’s goal is to make it illegal to have private insurance. Ye gods.

I wish there was a way to force only the PNHP advocates to accept whatever the government feels like giving them and leave the rest of us alone.

1) no more expensive care. That costing $10 you get, $100, you wait, $1000, forget it.

2) Doctors would earn as they do in Europe and Canada, like my gardener, under $100,000. That means, come 5 PM, hell or high water, they go home. Emergency surgery for someone with an ice pick in his head in England? Six days later. After a certain month of the year, the budget ends in Canada, that means all care is for free. That means the doctor cannot be found. He does not want to work for free.

3) Government does nothing well. No known exception to the rule. That means the folks who did the Katrina and the Iraq reconstrustions get to run the nation’s health care system.

4) It is a lawyer take over of the $2 trillion budget. Any doctor collaborating with that should be shunned.

Power and control has always held a special attraction for many physicians. I guess it is a result of combining professional arrogance of “Doctor knows best” with the inane belief that their is a technical fix to every human problem–or at least a devotion to finding one.

2. Perceived political feasibility aside for one moment, which is actually the better? PNHP’s goal is to advocate for the best plan that can actually work, to provide universal coverage, comprhensive coverage, individual affordability and system wide control of costs. HR-676, Improved and Expanded Medicare for All can do this. GAO & CBO both scored single payer approach as best economically. Continued subsidizing of the wasteful for-profit private insurance companies forgoes $350 savings bilion per year. Administrative waste is a natural byproduct of the private insurance firms that would retain a central role under HCAN’s plan. Private plans’ overhead is 12-fold higher than under NHI; the excess is squandered on marketing, underwriting, utilization reviewers and profits, and for the billions paid to executives. And the multiplicity of insurers envisioned in the plan precludes paying hospitals a global, lump sum budget; such budgets would save additional billions by obviating the need for most hospital billing and much of the internal accounting needed to attribute hospital costs to individual patients and payers.

Keeping the for-profit privates in the mix allows them to continue to game the system (e.g. skimming the healthy and wealthy; dumping the sick, poor, old on the public system).

HCAN’s proposal duplicates key elements of health reforms that have passed (and then failed) in multiple states: Massachusetts in 1988; Oregon in 1989; Tennessee, Minnesota and Vermont in 1992; Washington State in 1993; and Maine in 2003. In each case, rising costs scuttled the reform effort; none had a durable impact on the number of uninsured. The 2006 Massachusetts law, which incorporates many of the features of HCAN’s plan, is already threatened by rising costs, despite offering skimpy coverage and leaving many uninsured. And Massachusetts, with its low rate of uninsurance to begin with, and a large fund devoted to care of the uninsured, offered the optimal conditions for trying such a plan.