Let’s not do this on a national scale.
Instead let’s fund a national pool for patients who become uninsurable. And let’s make health care financing mor elike true insurance – you pay (and budget) for routine stuff, but the insurance will kick in to help with major medical expenses.

……But of course you don’t want the rest of the country to enjoy the same opportunity…….actually as you well know Romney resisted this for a long time and now goes around the country pretending it had nothing to do with him…..St Peter and the cock crowing?

We do disagree on universal coverage. It is the key to bringing down the cost for the entire risk pool, i.e. nation. Whether we choose the Swedish or the Swiss model is not so important. The principle is.

She is calling a rather weak reform bill “the crown jewel of socialism.”

When are voters going to reject people who sling this kind of mindless hyperbole?

The main threat to Americans’ existing employer-provided private health insurance is the public option–if, in the future, it continues to expand at the expense of the private insurance market.

That’s why I’m not in favor of it.

There are other ways to achieve cost containment.

And of course, in most states I couldn’t purchase individual health insurance–even though I could afford it–because of my new pre-existing condition. If I had already been covered by individual health insurance, once I got sick, my insurer would have had a right to drop me from their rolls.

Fortunately, I live in Massachusetts, where Romney’s health care reform package, passed in 2006, included guaranteed issue.

If I had gotten sick 10 years earlier, I would have had to declare bankruptcy and go live in a Section 8 housing project, in order to raise the cash to pay for my dialysis and other medical bills. (My medical bills this year came to over $90,000–for just one year.)

Lanny Davis just wrote a column in which he urged his fellow liberals to think about the plight of folks like me, for whom guaranteed issue is FAR more important than the public option. Guaranteed issue and mandated near-universal coverage will keep millions of Americans out of bankruptcy. Far more Americans will be helped by those features, than by a public option that at first will be purchased only by those Americans who aren’t eligible for employer-provided insurance–which is less than 20% of the public.

http://tinyurl.com/y87kvkd

It would likely help with her – in my experience, a conservative who favors a progressive cause is one who has been touched with the need for that cause (eg – the Cheney family favors gay rights, many times I’ve met Republicans with athletic teen-age daughters who were big time Title IX advocates, Sinz here is a promoter of protecting Medicare benefits). But it wouldn’t convince anyone else.