[crusso]

So we should do away with all regulation then?

Straw man/false dilemma.

Being cognizant of the danger of unnecessary concentrations of power in our society does not mean that there's no reason to concentrate power.

It means having a healthy understanding of the side-effects of that concentration of power and gives yet another reason to keep government's focus on the narrow side.

Plenty of nations (i.e. all first world nations) have implemented national schemes of some sort, and none of them suffer from the stuff that you read about coming from the right's bullshit machine.

Broad generalizations. Actually, many first world nations have had huge problems with their national schemes from poor medical services and poor availability of actual treatment to larger economic issues resulting from overspending on social programs like health care.

The bottom line for me is that the health care law passed is a huge and complicated power grab of a mess that did nothing to address the main issues that needed to be addressed: Reduction of the middlemen and price-hiding tactics standing between healthcare providers and consumers. The government had a real opportunity to cut the ties between place-of-work and healthcare. They had a real opportunity to give consumers the tools and rights they needed so that they could be informed purchasers of healthcare services.

[makomk]

We'd have exactly the same problem even if there was no government to co-opt at all, though. In particular the Libertarian market-based approach has exactly the same problem. If businesses can convince newspapers to smear politicians who're inconvenient to them, there's nothing stopping them doing the same to researchers who've discovered their drug is killing people, or doctors who've noticed their factory workers are being slowly poisoned, or anyone else who tries to give consumers the information required to make sound decisions.

[king_jester]

I agreed with what you said up until the last paragraph. Providing a system in which individuals and families more directly choose their health care spending from providers is not a solution to health care access problems. There must be some kind of program available nationwide that serves those that would never be able to purchase health care on their own, due to poverty, homelessness, and disability (among other things). However, this is the fundamental issue for health care at the moment: many government officials simply do not believe that those people should be served at all and that no program should be created or expanded to do so. In fact, those politicians actually want to go the other way with it and reduce the effectiveness of Medicare and Medicaid. This is the real political environment in which the PPACA was introduced and passed.

We can argue whether other approaches would have worked for new health care legislation, but the whole point of any reforms is that it can actually be achieved. Universal health care systems and privatization schemes do not have enough support politically to be feasible, which has a lot to do with other political and social issues in the US.