HIs brain's warped, but not by MySQL, which supports this just fine, even with MyISAM.

I could be wrong, but I thing the GGP's "anything better to do" was sarcastic, pointing at the fact that the police have lots of better things to be doing, so why are we hiring them out to police private parties? I don't necessarily agree with him, just pointing out the alternative interpretation.

And having lived in the UK for 20 years and Germany for 10, I'll take the NHS. What do your personal preferences (or for that matter mine) have to do with the debate at hand?

The US government spends a lot of money on foreign aid (although not nearly as much as most Americans think it does). That doesn't mean it's running foreign countries.

I'm English and live in Germany. I'm mostly amazed that, even if I'm misinformed about the odd thing here and there, I have a better grasp of the proposed reform than most of the Americans I speak to.

Incidentally, I think your post was more replying to the grandparent post, not to me.

It costs money to get people health insurance. That doesn't mean that the government's going to be providing that insurance.

Where do you get a trillion dollars from? The CBO has this to say:

CBO and JCT estimate that enacting both pieces of legislation—H.R. 3590 and the
reconciliation proposal— would produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $138
billion over the 2010–2019 period as result of changes in direct spending and revenue
(see the top panel of Table 1 and subtitle A of title II on Table 5).

OK, so the person who writes the RFC on SMTP, saying what SMTP servers can and can't do, is then running all of the world's SMTP servers? You don't think you might be approaching this from a somewhat.. hardline perspective?

Did you, or are you going by what Glenn Beck is saying?

I don't see anything about an expansion of Medicare there - it proposes closing the donut hole and other tightening. You're right that it expands Medicaid - but more in the nature of a tweak than anything significant.

You may prefer to look at the current text of the bill.

Page 116:

        TITLE II—EDUCATION AND
        2 HEALTH
        3 Subtitle A—Education
        4 SEC. 2001. SHORT TITLE; REFERENCES.
        5 (a) SHORT TITLE.—This subtitle may be cited as the
        6 ‘‘SAFRA Act’’.

Perhaps you ought to read through a newer version of the bill.

Do you have a source for that?

There's an individual mandate, but nobody has said that it has to be via your employer.

And that will be a different debate. When that debate's being had, your point will be germane (although still not helpful). That's not the debate that we're having today.

"After controlling for enabling and need characteristics in logistic regression models, Veterans Administration (VA)-only users were 2 to 8 times more satisfied with their outpatient care than were VA nonusers on 5 out of 10 satisfaction measures.". Oh, and I have a source. You appear to have a mysterious "Someone in Congress".

Also, the proposed health care bill doesn't set up anything even slightly like the VA. VA -> single provider of health care, like the NHS in Britain. The proposed public option would have been a step toward having a single payer, but still with multiple independent providers. The proposed bill doesn't introduce either.