What makes me CRAZY about this whole "Obamacare" individual mandate business is that it was originally, completely a conservative, Republican idea......that all these "freeloaders" who should be getting coverage, weren't, and then were showing up at emergency rooms on the taxpayers' dime. The whole idea was to force individual responsibility, and Mitt Romney, the Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich and a host of others were all for that individual mandate that would ensure people had to purchase health insurance, so we wouldn't be giving that proverbial "free ride" to so many people.

THEN, as soon as President Obama tried to incorporate their ideas into the health care reform plan, their desire to obstruct and be against anything at all he wanted to do, even if it was THEIR idea in the first place, kicked in, because their desire to see him lose was greater than their desire to find solutions.

How did all those "freeloaders" all of a sudden turn into "freedom loving patriots" being forced by a big bad government to buy something, as opposed to folks not taking responsibility for getting healthcare insurance, and thereby being layabouts just expecting the taxpapers to save them when they showed up in emergency rooms needing lifesaving care? Which is how the Republican/conservatives were portraying them when THEY were pushing an individual mandate.

And, why is something that is designed to ensure that coverage is available to all, while utilizing our private enterprise system, but trying to make it more effective, such a bad thing? Do we somehow think that by bleating about repealing "Obamacare", that we can make the problems of fifty million people not having health insurance, insurance companies cherry picking who they will ensure in an effort to have as few people who might NEED care on their rolls as they can manage, ensuring higher profits for their shareholders, just go away?

At least this President has TRIED to address the problems. I am sick to death of all the people determined to tear the plan down, but with no coherent idea as to how to get people with pre-existing conditions covered, try to bend costs, or get us out of this morass of paying massively more money than other countries with effective systems pay, yet having results so poor in comparison. It's hard not to believe that the game at hand is simply "make sure that Obama can't succeed, even if we drag the country down in the process". They've shown their willingness to bring us to the brink of defaulting on debt for the first time in our history to make political points.

Maybe we ARE headed toward another civil war, because polarity seems to be so complete that if Obama somehow came up with something (like the individual mandate) that every rightwinger wanted, they would immediately switch sides, swear up and down they never wanted any such thing (as they are doing on the individual mandate), and we'd be off to the races again.


Why, why, why are we practically the only developed democracy in the world, especially among the several dozen richest countries, who haven't solved this problem, who have many millions of our citizens without healthcare coverage, and that we pay more than twice as much as other countries for results that often don't even put us in the top several dozen countries in various measures of effectiveness of health care?