Just like police and fire protection

Just like police and fire protection, K-12 education, and highways, and maybe more so, in the 21^st century health care is a basic right. (Some will disagree, and would even charge per fire or per crime one is a victim of.) It is just what I believe and what the majority in the US believes. Providing all these services is not just for the individual but benefits the community as a whole. Nations without roads and schooling have lousy economies. Sick people cannot work productively and infect others.

I am a leftie Democrat but, frankly, I haven't seen a strong case for a public option,—so long as private insurers are regulated as tightly as, say, a gas utility. They need to have no incentive to refuse payment for existing conditions or treatments they did not invent—so long as they pay for health care and not just catastrophe care.

Getting to such a plan as law is up to the all the Democrats plus one or two Republicans, of a full range of ideologies. The GOP has no role. They have left the playing field and gotten up into the stands as hecklers. The President and the Democratic leadership should ignore their caterwauling. Let's get on with crafting a way to deliver health care to everyone.

Let's talk health care

Sarah Palin's report recently that the Obama Health Plan includes a death panel for people with congenital disorders is of course false. (Read her statement: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434.)

Ms. Palin's is only a variation on the euthanasia scare pitch coming from the Republican-Insurance Company cartel. And the euthanasia story is only the worst of the distortions the cartel is pitching. But all this garbage is not what we should be discussing.

We should talk about providing health care to the roughly one of six Americans with no insurance who must therefore use emergency departments as doctor's offices, so the ED's are near collapse.

We should talk about providing health care to people who do have insurance but whose carriers have found ways to deny converge, often stories about pre-existing conditions that would make a used car salesman blush.

We should talk about the excellent health care plans members of Congress have that they refuse so far to share.

We should talk about the drug part of health care that will still not have the government negotiate drug prices with the manufacturers, when drugs are often the most expensive part of health care.

We should talk about helping America catch up with other developed countries with national health care that have longer life expectancy and lower neo-natal death rates than the U.S.

We should talk about a federal health care option that would provide a standard against which to measure private insurance plans.

We should talk about how the most expensive proposals for health care now on the table would cost the federal government only about $100 billion a year, about ¼ of the defense budget. How can we have a secure nation when we don't care for our ill?