The guy is just evil. W may have been stoopid, but this guy is plain evil.

I'd like to hear Obama's comments on this. The irony is so sweet.

The whole problem with healthcare is the insurance part. It is because of insurance that healthcare is so expensive in the first place. Just like education loans are the reason education is so expensive in the first place.

Redrajesh, you're half right.

It's not insurance, per se, that's the reason for the expense of health care, it's the idea that health insurance should cover everything from a stubbed toe to brain cancer (and everything in between).

Health insurance should be like auto or home insurance (despite some faults, they do it mostly right). Day to day maintenance and check ups and simple repairs / procedures are paid directly by the individual. The insurance then (should, at least) pays for the catastrophic events.

If that were the case in current medical insurance practice, both insurance costs and medical costs would be a lot lower (for example, there's a medical practice in Oklahoma that advertises their actual costs and takes cash (and those actual costs are *much* lower than the places that take insurance)).

And ... They show no signs of going out of business. Kinda says something about the real value of insurance, eh?

And, the thing is, most of the insurance companies probably wouldn't have too much of an issue with just providing catastrophic coverage, but they're being forced (by a bunch of morons) to cover checkups and hangnails and so on, because of the idea that taking care of a car or a house is your responsibility, but taking care of your health is the governments' responsibility.

And that might not be actually *too* horrible, for the most part, except that the government sucks at it (and that sentence fragment could have stopped after 5 words and still been accurate).

The other thing about homeowners and auto insurance is that loosening up some of the regulations has increased competition and help keep prices down. I'd have to run some numbers, but I'm thinking that the cost increases in auto insurance since 1985 or so have been less than inflation. I can remember when everyone used to complain about the cost of auto insurance; nowdays, it's not a big concern for most people.