And if someone does not have a perfect memory for everything that was ever recorded on one of his medical charts … he is liable for later denial of claim based on pre-existing conditions that were not fully disclosed.

Well, I wish we could ban “recession”. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). But we could get rid of the current practice of recission easily enough; in fact it’s already illegal, it’s just that the law in question has no teeth (though judges are usually quite displeased when cases involving recissons come to court and the insurers get the book thrown at them. Problem is, too many sick people do not have the resources for such a fight). Any insurance company writing an individual policy should simply have to do its homework up front to check into the subscriber’s pre-existing conditions. In today’s digitalized world this should be easy. Auto insurers do this; how many drivers have their policies rescinded after they have an accident? This doesn’t happen because the companies check driving records when they issue policies. And health insurance companies even have their own database where they store patient info for this precise purpose. So let them do their due diligence and then, if they issue a policy, they should be required to honor it (absent court-worthy evidence of actual fraud). I can think of no other business that is allowed to renegue on its contracts in such a manner, outside a bankruptcy court. Any health insurer that does so should not just have the book thrown at them, but the whole dang law library.

…….Exposing this guys ignorance has its own satisfactions I suppose…….a bit like sds’s…..but is it worth the effort…….their vacuity is so enormous

“Otto brings forth the European model as an example of the proper application of Liberal or in Europes case social medicine.
The fact however those models of medical wonder are broke. Pick the country in Europe and they are struggling to cover the cost. ”

………Actually they are not broke……..there’s a mix of pure socialized systems, hybrid private/socialized systems and private systems….. none of them cost more than 60% of what we’re spending and in most respects like infant mortality, life expectancy etc they produce superior outcomes to the US system which is bankrupting the country and rendering large tracts of our manufacturing industry uncompetitive…….the OECD ranks the US healthcare system 37th in effectiveness……your ignorance of even the most basic facts about healthcare comparators is let’s say startling

Isn’t math fun? Irrelevant, but fun!

But even with that said, I’m also curious what the Canadian comparison is, with respect to polls. If Americans are X% satisfied with their health care plan, what % of Canadians are? Also, if Americans are X% satisfied, what percentage of those polled had interactions with the system that went beyond routine to minimally serious illness? Similarly for Canadians? What percentage of Americans are satisfied with their health care system as a whole (beyond their plan)? What percentage of Canadians are?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But if we’re going to whip out polls, we need to ask difficult questions and put poll questions and answers into serious context.

What percentage of Canadians do this? And of the ones that do, what demographic do they fit into?

Ahh – I see a claim shift here. Originally you wrote: “if McCain had picked up less than 443k more votes” … now you say “if just 443K voters had moved toward McCain”. Those are two different things, aren’t they?

But here’s the table I presented before:

McCain needed to flip 97 electoral votes.

Here’s the numbers for states where Obama won by less than 443k votes – I invite anyone to play with this and come up with a 443k additional vote for McCain that gets him 93 electoral votes.
Wisconsin 10 -414,818
Connecticut 7 -368,344
Oregon 7 -298,816
Minnesota 10 -297,945
Ohio 20 -262,224
Florida 27 -236,450
Virginia 13 -234,527
DC 3 -228,433
Colorado 9 -214,987
Hawaii 4 -205,305
Iowa 7 -146,561
Rhode Island 4 -131,180
Maine 2 -126,650
New Mexico 5 -125,590
Nevada 5 -120,909
Vermont 3 -120,288
Delaware 3 -103,085
New Hampshire 4 -68,292
Indiana 11 -28,391
North Carolina 15 -14,177
NE 2nd Dist. 1 -3,313

I still can’t get the math to work exactly, but it’s closer (I can make it work with about a 475K vote flip from Obama to McCain.

But for perspective – if you flip 432K McCain voters to Obama, Obama could pick up Missouri, Montana, ND, SD, WVA, Idaho, South Carolina, and Georgia … giving him a 423-115 electoral win.

So if we take somewhere around 450K as a potential variance – maybe 450K Obama voters flip to McCain, maybe 450K McCain voters flip to Obama – we can construct error bars for the electoral results.

Those error bars are bounded by a 270-268 McCain victory at one end … and a 423-115 Obama victory at the other.

This is an exercise that can be performed historically, as well. For example, in the 1980 election, had Jimmy Carter gotten 730K of Reagan’s votes, Carter would have won the election. Does that mean anything? Not really …