I agree that lowering of healthcare costs is the core priority. Universal healthcare is fundamentally unachievable if the yearly increase in healthcare costs continues to outpace the increase in average wages.

Quoted: The other candidates all mention cost, of course. But for those on the Democratic side, the priority in this election is not cost but coverage. Some 47m Americans lack any form of health cover, being neither poor nor old enough to qualify for government-funded health schemes, and having neither a generous enough employer nor sufficient financial resources of their own to pay for private health insurance.

This model is an alternative to HealthVault's model of storing your records online. In my opinion, neither model is strictly better than the other. Each has it's pro's and con's.

Quoted: MedeFile has a patent pending on the technology that allows patients to store their medical records on a USB drive called a MedeDrive that can be carried on a key chain and loads on all Windows-based PCs.

Sicko was eye opening, and I am happy I saw it. At the same time, I do appreciate that CNN is fact checking and then asking questions when they find something contradictory to what's presented in Sicko.

Quoted: "It's ironic that someone who has made a career out of holding powerful interests accountable is so sensitive to having his own work held up to the light by impartial journalists, as we did in our examination of 'SiCKO,' " the spokesperson said.

I learned a lot in Sicko about how health insurance is messed up in the U.S. Michael Moore did a real service here. But, I was left wondering if his proposed solution was really without tradeoffs. I am going to watch "Dead Meat" which is mentioned in this article to get another perspective.

Quoted: The argument that the cure to the nation’s health care problems is a single-payer system is worth consideration, but filmmaker Michael Moore left out the trade-offs.
...
Mr. Loder cited the short film “Dead Meat,” which presents anecdotes of failure in the Canadian single-payer system. In its one-sidedness, “Dead Meat” (available online at onthefencefilms.com) might have made for a nice double feature with “Sicko,” and left moviegoers with a more complete understanding of the complications of deciding on a health care system.