It may be slightly better, because it would make it easier for people to shop around and people buying health insurance through the exchange would get lower rates due to decreased overall risk for the insurance companies.

It wouldn’t be as huge of a step forward as if there was a public option, but it would be a step in the right direction.

Even a public option that isn’t taxpayer-funded at all would be beneficial because it could make the insurance market competitive again. The lack of competition in the health insurance industry is the cause of a lot of these problems. Inject (no pun intended) a major publicly-owned non-profit health insurance company into the mix and premiums would fall.

This will stop thousands of companies that purposely keep workers under 35 hours so they don’t have to offer benefits. This way they will have to pay in one way or another.

The Walmarts of the world hold classes for employees on how to gain government benefits such as food stamps, charity care, etc. etc… They will have to contribute to the system whether or not they like it. Why should we Americans be forced to care for their workers because they wont?

No longer will they force the rest of us to provide care for the people that give their lives to the cheep ass companies just so they can lower the bottom line and give more back to their share holders.

A new system will make it much more fair for everyone and get the cost of it off the backs of middle income families. We’ve been squeezed enough and can’t take any more.

This is why the big companies want to stop it, they will be made to contribute fairly but of course they don’t want to.

I haven’t seen this part of the equation brought up yet but it is a very important part of the debate.

~Discuss~

There’s the claim that sky-high taxes will be required to pay for universal care. In the US, healthcare spending accounts for 16% of GDP, and it’s still going up. In Canada, it might be 10%. When you add non-tax healthcare spending to US taxes, it works out to a few percentage points less than Sweden, about as much as the Netherlands, and MORE than Canada. The money is already there, but it goes to insurance-company profits, pharmaceutical profits, lawsuit-avoiding tests with no medical necessity, and administrative costs that could already be slashed by simply requiring one basic data format for all Medicaid and Medicare providers.

There wouldn’t be as many malpractice suits if doctors would allow their peers to be weeded out–the incompetent, the addicted, the medically disabled (like surgeons whose hands are too unsteady to use a scalpel safely). That would cut the number of unnecessary tests, and would remove most of the contentiousness over tort reform.

Emma, wasn’t your “Canadian” health card actually issued by a provincial health plan (like OHIP in Ontario)? Please don’t let Americans continue fostering the mistaken belief that Canada has one federal medicare system, because it doesn’t.

As for Canadian – I’m all for learning from that country to benefit our own. However, should we really want to take on all of Canada’s situations, perhaps we could simply take over Canada?