Why, just because you need it to survive? You need food to survive, too. Does that make food a basic human right? I'm sorry, but just because I'm running a restaurant or grocery doesn't make me morally obligated to feed every starving moneyless waif who comes along. I guess that makes me heartless.

I hate to break it to you but insurance companies are not the only or even the biggest problem that our health care system faces. The insurance companies aren't the ones who set up the "pay for service" model that encourages health care inflation. The insurance companies aren't the reason that we have a shortage of GPs. The insurance companies aren't the reason why malpractice insurance rates are so high. I know it's popular for the Democrats to paint this as a "big insurance vs. everybody else" battle but there's really a lot more to it than that.

It's technically also true that you need to do business with the food companies to stay alive. Maybe the Government should take over the agriculture industry as well?

Oh wait, through corporate welfare and lobbying interests (tax breaks, money into boondoggles like ethanol, a need to appease Iowa to win Presidential primaries, etc, etc) it already has. Hmm, I wonder what the result is? Surely a balanced and well managed system that's working for the greater good, right? I bet if you had left it up to the free market we could have wound up with something that runs on fast food and high fructose corn syrup and which has resulted in 30% of Americans being obese.

You'll forgive my skepticism that the Government is going to improve the health care system.

Yes, they will. Ever heard the expression 'caveat emptor'? The difference between your friendly mega-corp and the government is that nobody is forcing you to do business with the mega-corp. The mega-corp can't come and take your money at gunpoint. You have to decide to do business with them.

It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

It may work just fine for individual use, but in an enterprise environment when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies Open Office is completely useless.

So their actually at 10% efficiency, which while unlikely at least has the merit of not being theoretically impossible.

How on earth do you equate Microsoft following the rules of the GPL as something bad?