@ Dana: Our rights to what? Be victims of physics? Think of seatbelts as something the government is asking you to do, not for yourself, but to protect your fellow citizens. Because the seatbelt doesn’t just keep you in the seat, it also keeps you *behind the wheel*, which gives you a better chance to avoid hurting *somebody else.* Somebody who maybe doesn’t have as sweet a deal as you on insurance, say.

@Helen: Amen on Michael York, and please pass the Richard Jordan.

@liberalrob: I do remember the Logan’s Run TV show! It starred Gregory Harrison (yum!), and Heather Menzies–who had played Louisa in the film “The Sound of Music,” and later married Robert Urich. (Spenser for Hire–also yum!)

Man, I know a lot of pointless crap, don’t I?

So your wife’s salary is being short-changed by $9600-12000 per year. Surely you would rather get the money and go get your own individual insurance policy or healthcare savings account (or go without for a year or so if you’re a healthy lot), if THE MAN would just let you.

Again, as the Chicago Police Union has learned, 100% covereage is becoming a thing of the past. At any time, your wife’s employer may decide that she needs to kick in 30% or 50% or 100% of the premium without a comiserate raise in salary. That’s gonna hurt.

Then you’ll start to understand where the majority of Americans are coming from. We pay more per capita for healthcare than anywhere in the western world (nearly double) and receive less care. Where does that money go? To the for-profit insurance agencies. It does nothing for the doctors or the patients.

I think if we had parallel systems, the Government run system would be so superior that everyone else would migrate over after there fears that “it could never work here” are assuaged and they see the rest of us paying on average thousands of dollars less per year (based on comparisons to industrialized nations with socialized medicine).

Given those efficiency gains, you would imagine single-payer health care would be very appealing to even the most anti-government person. We accepted government run police and fire services, why not government run health care?

If someone is too lazy to vote, as far as I am concerned, he has consented to the choices taken by other people.

I’m curious, would you say the same about anyone who supports a third party candidate?

The majority of people did NOT vote for Bush in 2000, including myself. Given the nature of Electoral voting and the importance of swing states, a voter’s power can be further diluted, and there are rational reasons to not vote.

This is not to say voting does not have power, just that it has limited liability, especially if you vote for “the other guy”, instead of the one who wins and comes into office to fuck everything up.

I just do not believe we are all little Eichmanns. Just the Republicans.

There’s a problem with these MRI exams: they’re useless. Or worse. I’ve dealt with MRIs from this sort of private clinic several times and they were without exception so poor quality that they could not be meaningfully read and had to be redone. And I don’t know where they find the “radiologists” who read them, but I somehow doubt that their qualifications are legit–their interpretations are almost always off, even given the poor quality of the exams themselves. In one particularly tragic case, the private clinic told a patient with liver cancer that his tumors were gone. They weren’t, of course, the MRI was just so badly done that they couldn’t be seen. But breaking the news that he was not cured, as he had believed, to him was not fun. So my advice on these types of MRI is to avoid them at all costs. They’re worse than useless. Go to Canada and wait for a high quality MRI. It might take a while, but at least the technicians running the machine and the radiologists reading the results will probably be competent.

Ahem. As you were.