But at the same time - that's not the reason why our health care costs are higher while our coverage is lower. You can look at the stats - there are the Scandinavian countries with great social programs that spend quite a bit on health care, then everyone else is less than half the costs of the US. We're spending over twice as much as most countries and we still have tens of millions without any coverage at all!

Even looking at Greece - a country that spent too much on social programs and is known for having citizens that don't work much is down at near 1/3 the costs the US. Now it's possible that all these countries are just better at educating their citizens and giving them preventative care - that could cut down on a lot of the factors that raise health costs later in life. Either way, we should be looking at what they're doing and what we're doing wrong, because what we've been doing the past few decades sure as hell hasn't been working.

I don't think there's anything biologically that different that makes us have such higher costs. You'd think there'd be at least one country of cancer-prone obese chain smokers that would out rank us, but we're at the top but a good margin

But if you're a good torrent user then in the process of downloading you'll also be uploading. If you're a bad torrent user then you suck

Verizon now has a "No sports" option for their TV service that costs $10/month less so I'd guess it's around that much.

Just because they're legally required to block the content, doesn't mean they agree with the block or want to do it. On the contrary, it would be more in the ISP's interest to show that they're being legally pushed to block the content rather than the content just appearing not to work.

It's not the government in many of these cases that's doing the actual blocking, it's ISPs where the people that have to install the filters are your typical slashdotter.

True, no one's pointing a gun at them and telling them to buy the packs of raman rather than the 5lbs of carrots, but there are forces in play (market forces making it cheap to get a whole meal, time forces making it faster to prepare and eat the meal). It would be great to have an insurance company with an economic incentive working for these people to give them healthier alternatives.

I wouldn't call Switzerland's laws "lax" - there are lots of guns, but you won't see the American style gun toters that want to bring their handguns into the bar (hard to get a carry permit without a good reason there). The thing with the European solutions is many of them have health care that's cheaper overall - not just for the individuals, but the total healthcare spending per person is lower than in the US, including private and public costs.

Exactly! People are too busy to prepare healthy food and at the same time forced to take jobs where they aren't getting much exercise.

It's not even that the corporations making these foods are evil. They're giving people exactly what they want - tasty food with little or no preparation. The problem is that the healthier alternatives don't sell as well, so people end up getting pushed to buy the less healthy alternatives.

The strange thing about this debate is that conservatives can't point to a single country or time in history where their health care policies are working. There are lots of countries that have cheaper health care than us and lots that have healthier citizens. From a logically standpoint, you'd think we'd look at those and take the best parts for our own system, but we have this misguided notion from some that people should be severely punished (with death) for their mistakes instead of helping them.

You're not going to see the health benefits from a meaball sub. That's also still more than the $1-$2 a meal available from the grocery store. Do you think people are aiming to be obese? They eat what's available to them in their budget which is usually overly processed unhealthy food.

The great thing about providing health insurance to all these people is the insurance companies have an economic incentive to get them healthier. It's why I can get reimbursed for a gym membership and my insurance company sends literature about a healthy life style. Since healthier people cost less to insure than unhealthy people, the free market will come in to help people get healthier, and costs will go down. It's basically a win-win situation that you could only hate if you were afraid the party that passed it would look good because of it,

Sure that's great if they want to splurge for $8 at subway twice a day, but that's quite a bit of money. Those cheap pre-packaged meals (cheaper thanks to corn subsidies) are more likely to be in a good price range at a couple dollars per meal. Even eating a reasonable amount of heavily processed (and cheap) food will take it's toll on the health of most people.

NASA certainly has thousands of pages of documents for going to space. Are you saying we should make a national health agency and just give it money?

For the vast majority, being poor isn't a "mistake". It's not always possible to live the healthiest lifestyle without money. But go ahead and live with your "poor people should die" theory. As long as you don't have to get close to them, you should be ok.

There's no easy solution to health care that's going to be doable with a 3-page bill. Health care is a very complicated system so it will require a complicated bill.

Just to be clear on your position: You believe that it's better for us to keep funding (expensive) emergency care rather than (cheap) preventative care, poor people that can't afford that should just die (because they're just lazy for being poor), and anyone who has any medical condition has it because of something they did to themself.

Wouldn't it be nicer if people weren't tied to an employer for health insurance (and not at their mercy)? How about the poor person that gets injured in a hit and run? They should die because they weren't responsible enough to spend their minimum wage job on health insurance instead of food?

The crazy libertarian view may seem nice if everyone is able to provide for themselves, but in our reality, corporations are always trying to screw people out of their money so not everyone can afford to pay the high costs of hospital care.

So your statement "The Democrats couldn't get a majority of their party" is true because 67% is not a majority? Who taught you math?

Malpractice reform: Malpractice accounts for ~30 billion. Assuming we can cut that down to 0 we've saved almost 2%, but a 2% that will shrink over time as other costs rise. While helpful, it's not a long term solution.

Cross-state insurance: A logistical nightmare for insurance companies - it's not like people are going to travel from New York to North Dakota to visit their doctor so the insurance company has to expand their network to the entire country. It might increase competition (if enough companies went for it), similar to how the new health care exchanges have been working.

"Cost control" is great as long as it's not just "we're going to lower coverage as rates go up". That's sort of the opposite of helping people.

You know what things people love and are very popular? Covering pre-existing conditions, students stay on their parents insurance, no life time caps. Problem is you can't just include those things if people can just get insurance as soon as they get sick - hence the insurance mandate.

Going back to lowering costs - when we cover comprehensive, then people can stay healthy and get care when it's cheap. Catastrophic health care is much more expensive. I'd much rather my health insurance gave grandma $20 for a flu shot than $20,000 for a hospital stay. It's a more long term solution to lowering costs that is needed.

It's weird how some people don't think we should provide health care to our citizens now in the modern world. Pretty much all the other first world countries do and they have much cheaper health care costs with much healthier citizens.

Not that it has no effect, but that the main reason people pirate is that they are greedy and want things for free

What you mean is actually "The Democrats couldn't even get a majority on board to support a public option". If the senate was all Democrats, they could have passed it easily, but the Republicans wouldn't even come to the table. The whole health care concept even came out of a Republican think tank.

What ideas did the Republicans want again?

You could read what the article is saying. They monitored and acknowledged that there was piracy, but there was a large increase the last week that correlated with the lack of a legal alternative for TW customers. That's pretty good evidence showing that sprinklers are making the sidewalk more wet. No one's saying that it doesn't rain - everyone knows it rains, that's a given, but this sprinkler theory is often debated by the big media so this provides a good example.