I MAY have been by Kos half a dozen times in as many years. Judging by the Dem party line these days, as a "kill biller" I wouldn't be welcome there these days anyway. It's more important to score a meaningless political victory over the Republicans than to pass effective legislation, after all. *pounds skull on monitor*

I'm aware of how the unions feel and why, and don't need Kos to tell me. For decades employers operating at the margins of profitability thanks to the boon of supply side economics have offered more medical insurance to unions because they couldn't offer better wages, and over time this has resulted in contracts in which great medical insurance is the biggest asset. I can understand why union members feel the same way about taxing the hell out of their biggest asset as their employers do about capital gains taxes doing it to THEIR chief asset. Yet clearly what we need is to heavily tax something whose possessors don't profit from it, rather than something whose possessors profit a great deal.

As far as punditry and its audience goes, however, I did recently have a friend tell me Mitt Romney was on Faux News explaining (as you did elsewhere) how no American is denied healthcare because they can just go to the ER and walk away from the resulting costs passed along to those with insurance. Doesn't happen to be true, but I wouldn't expect Mitt to have the firsthand experience to know that.

There is some good news for you though in the fact that all private insurance has been using cost control panels for ages; they just don't want any public option to do the same (and do want the government to legally protect their right to use them, in perpetuity. )

Insurance companies try to limit how much THEY spend on healthcare, but the cost to their policy holders is in both the direct cost of treatment AND premiums. Not only that, but the core of the "tort reform is the panacea to healthcare costs" argument is that malpractice judgments result in higher malpractice INSURANCE rates from those same insurers. Pretty much whatever happens in any aspect of healthcare, private insurances response is "raise insurance premiums" and that's driving the cost of healthcare more than anything.

On that last part I'm inclined to agree, and it's one of the biggest reasons I'm ignoring the pundits on the healthcare bill. It doesn't control costs, it just throws money at the problem in the absurd hope that if we force everyone to buy private insurance a combination of subsidies and punitive measures will meet current costs that will then stop rising at double digit percentage rates annually. Because, as we all know, the whole basis of the profit motive is you don't want to make TOO MUCH money....

It truly baffles me; the entire motive behind healthcare reform is to reduce costs and slow their meteoric rise so more and more Americans aren't forced to do without and/or bankrupted by healtchare costs. So we're going to dump a trillion tax payer dollars, plus whatever it costs those ineligible for subsidies, in the laps of private insurance and hope that sates their greed. When has giving away huge amounts of money ever reduced greed? Between Wall Street, Detroit and now Hartford I'm hard pressed to think of a President from any party who's offered big business more government handouts than Obama. And apart from extending unemployment benefits, also hard pressed to think of anything else he's done for the economy. It's hard to understand why Romeny would criticize the Presidents healthcare bill, given that he basically wrote it.