Sad.

Quoted: If Barack Obama wins the fall election, he will be under more pressure to establish universal health insurance than any president in U.S. history. This ...

This is pretty amazing. A 10.2% "benefits/medical loss ratio" means that the insurance company kept 89.8% of people's money (premiums) for themselves in profit and administration.

Quoted: In previous semesters the benefits ratios dipped as low as 10.2% and 13.8%. This means the college’s plan has been a veritable gold mine for ...

Quoted: Yet while politicians debate how best to cover the growing ranks of the uninsured, the federal government -- by outsourcing service jobs -- quietly is adding to those numbers. "As federal employees, we get great insurance," says Dr. Rogers, a physician who believes prompt treatment might have staved off Ms. Derricotte's disability. "People who work as contractors often don't enjoy those benefits."

The Netherlands are being batted around as model for U.S. healthcare reform.

Even more interesting, the Dutch have their "health", "welfare", and "sports" all in the same Ministry! ;-)

Quoted: (Health reform was passed in the Netherlands in 2006. Hundreds of thousands of Dutch are now uninsured (see below). More recent reports also note that another 240,000 people have defaulted on paying their premiums, for a total of about 3 percent of the population with no or defaulted coverage).

Here's a nice little succinct history of how the "mandate" model of "universal" health insurance has failed time after time.

Quoted: Variants of the mandate model, first proposed by Richard Nixon, were passed with great fanfare in Massachusetts (1988), Oregon (1989) and Washington State (1993). All died quiet deaths. As costs soared, legislators backed off from enforcing the mandates or funding new coverage for the poor. Massachusetts' recent reform, which largely excuses employers from the mandate but imposes steep fines on the uninsured, appears poised to follow a similar path. Of the middle-income uninsured who are required to pay the full premium for coverage, few have signed up. Meanwhile, the state has already announced a $147 million shortfall in funding for subsidies for the poor.

Cool.

Quoted: Of the respondents, 67% said they understood what “socialized medicine” meant. Of those, 79% said the term means that the government makes sure everyone has health insurance. Only 32% said it means that the government tells doctors what to do.

This is kind of cool. The AMA's popularity with docs looks like it's waning.

Quoted: The medical news service MedPage Today estimated that the AMA represented only 15 percent of practicing U.S. physicians in 2005, down from 70 percent during the 1961 Medicare fight....“A lot of younger doctors,” says Jenkins, “have gone into other groups and organizations because they haven’t always been happy with how the AMA is run and what they do.”... States like Minnesota and Massachusetts show majority support among physicians for a single-payer system, and the American College of Physicians—America’s second-largest physician group—endorsed such a proposal in December.

By Rose Ann DeMoro. I like her, she's funny.

Quoted: 1. It’s not the swiftest idea to force people to buy insurance without telling them how much it will cost and what they get in ...

Nice.

Quoted: “It’s much better for employee morale if a small-business owner never offers health benefits, than it is to offer them and then be forced to take it away because it is too expensive to continue,” said William J. Dennis, NFIB’s senior research fellow.