The world owes me a living. Obama says so.

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I think I've come up with a perfect, flawless solution. Let's all run for congress. I'm sure we have multiple people in various districts in WI, obviously Zero would be president. We can all vote for eachother. FLAWLESS VICTORY, M I RITE?

I had to laugh at this ... in a way I feel that perhaps this is true.

sounds like what packgirl is saying is - all the above is out to make money at the expense of others.

- everytime I drive in to chicago and I see these huge/lavish insurance company buildings I think to myself. They must be making ALOT of money.

Alan and Shawn, open heart surgery and amputations are exactly the kinds of catastrophic situations health insurance was meant to cover. Colds, flus, and birth control aren't. The reason why you struggle to get coverage for your situations is that the insurance companies are paying out untold billions for routine complaints to people with no- and low-deductible insurance plans.

Can you imagine how prohibitively expensive auto insurance would be if we were able to abuse it the way the average person abuses health insurance? I pay about $1200 per year for auto insurance. The average health insurance plan for my family is in excess of $900 per MONTH!

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Dulak - The sad thing is they are making a lot of money. The lawyers and the insurance companies are making more money than the doctors. You're seeing a lot of qualified Americans who no longer want to be doctors because it's not worth it.

For example John Edwards made millions suing hospitals. Guess how the hospitals recoup that money lost? That's right, raising their prices on us.

4Pack - And thus is why I'm for term limits. You put in term limits, you kill the idea of career politicians and cut back on corruption, and bring some fresh blood and fresh ideas in there.

Nonstop - Once again, agreed.

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When you look at the amount of money insurance companies take in, to the amount they spend on claims. They all are either breaking even or negative.

Insurance companies do not make money directly from your premium. They make money by being able to invest the premiums for as long as possible. It is called FLOAT and it is the same way banks make money. They invest your money and delay claims as long as possible. For each day, hour, minute they have your money it is invested someplace. So all the profit that they are making is because of float, not because they are taking money and not paying out.

This is why no public option can work. Unless we are going to let the government into public investing also. If the government wants to get things under control, they need to go for the real problem and that is not insurance companies.

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The Congressional mandate that emergency rooms must care for anyone who shows up at their doorstep, regardless of whether or not they're emergent cases, has been disastrous for hospitals. There isn't an emergency room in this country that actually makes money, because they end up having to write off the vast majority of the cases that show up to their door. How do the hospitals recoup the costs of these charity cases? By raising prices on patients in every other department, naturally.

People abuse the emergency wards everyday because they know ERs are open 24/7, and they can't be turned away regardless of how minor their complaints are. So they bring cases that should be treated at urgent care or in the clinic, because they can't be bothered to seek care during normal business hours (despite the fact that most urgent care clinics are open till 9:00 or even 11:00 p.m.!). It is my firm belief that emergency wards should be able to responsibly triage patients who walk in and refer the non-emergent cases to urgent care or the health clinic. If that means the parent has to take a few hours off work, fine -- that's one of the responsibilities of parenthood.

The day I realized how bad the situation is was the day some parent brought in a child to the ER because she had a "scraped thumb" and we had to treat the child like any other patient. But what really brought it home for me personally was the day I had to bring my wife into the ER for vaginal bleeding due to miscarriage. She had to wait over seven hours before she was brought into an examination room and still another hour before she was treated, because that day the ER was packed to overflowing with parents who had brought in their kids for sniffles and sneezes. This was during the height of the SARS scare, you see, and the egomaniacal parents of Fayetteville, North Carolina, were convinced their precious little babies must have SARS. So instead of doing the responsible thing and taking their children to the health clinic on Monday, they insisted on bringing them into the ER on Saturday. Meanwhile my wife, who under emergency medicine protocols should have been a high-priority patient, had to sit around the entire day waiting for care. Assholes.

The next time you wonder why the hospitals charge you $60 per tablet of Tylenol, blame these irresponsible people who are exercising their Congressionally mandated "human right to healthcare."

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Nonstop - The border states also have to treat illegals who have no medical insurance, and it would be easier for hospitals to squeeze water out of a rock than a dime out of an illegal.

My mother worked in a hospital that closed several years later due to the simple fact it couldn't make money, and in this particular case, it was directly due to illegals.

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I updated my post with a personal anecdote that you probably missed, Zombieslayer 😉

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Kudos to NSD for hitting the economics of the health insurance and healthcare industries right on the nose. Health insurance companies don't make a crapton of money (relative to other companies in other sectors), most hospitals make jack shit. Pharmaceutical companies are the ones that make all the money, however they also drive innovation with a lot of research. However, they also pocket a lot of that money. If you're going to go after someone for gouging, how about Big Pharmaceutical, not Big Health Insurance?

The entire health insurance industry needs reform. What people want is free healthcare, not free health insurance. I'd be reluctantly OK with the government subsidizing catastrophic health insurance for people that can't have it, however as NSD hit right on the head, that's not what people want the health insurance for.

We don't live in a perfect world, there's simply not enough resources going around to make this economy work if we mandate too much more crap on top of it and increase taxes. What we really need is a serious immigration policy - EVERY citizen needs to prove that they're legally supposed to be here at the next census. If you're not, you're being deported. If you get arrested and you're not supposed to be here, you're deported. If you come back again and get arrested again, you go to prison. While reducing or eliminating illegal immigrants will not fix all or most of our problems, it will remove a huge burden on the healthcare and public education systems. It will also help with unemployment... although the cynical side of me says that most people would rather just ride unemployment than take a minimum wage job picking cabbages.