I understand the desire to keep government small and the concerns about avoiding the government having an influence over our health care and I respect those concerns. They are valid. However, right now you have a multitude of third parties already affecting your healthcare and most of them do not have your interest at heart.

Insurance companies look at payments towards your health care as losses and denials of your health care as profits.

Hospitals look at you the patient as part of their supply chain. An input into their health factory from which they can generate revenue by billing obscene amounts of money for tests and procedures that they tell you are necessary. As a doctor, I do not believe that we intend to subject patients to unnecessary procedures, but we currently have a system that encourages spending money, discourages primary preventative care, incentivizes procedures, interferes with the patient-doctor relationship and still has among the worst patient outcomes in the developed world. We are very good at "rescue medicine." We are foolishly willing to spend unlimited resources trying to prevent the inevitable, and are not willing to make sure that a vast number of people in our country can't get basic vaccines, can't get a check up, can't see a doctor in a timely manner when they feel sick.

We don't have a free market economy in healthcare and for good reason. In most markets, as you pay more, you get better quality and better results. In healthcare, the sicker you are, the more expensive your care, and the less likely you are to have a good result.

There is also the issue of supply driven demand. As a technology or medicine becomes available, the patient starts to request or even demand those services, whether necessary, appropriate, cost-effective or not.

You would think as more MRI machines open up in a community, they would compete for the same number of MRI's and the price would go down. But in healthcare, studies consistently show that the price stays the same or even rises, and the number of MRI tests goes up to keep them busy. As the supply increases, it drives its own demand.

So while I respect the concerns of those opposed to this bill, I disagree with your conclusions about the status of our current system and your expectations of what this bill will do to healthcare. While the bill is not perfect, we must be practical and choose to support this bill or oppose it based on whether or not it will be an improvement from the status quo.

I strongly believe it will be an improvement. Quite frankly, anything would be better than what we have right now.

MD.."anything would be better than what we have right now"

Do you really, honestly believe that?

These people is supposed to be working for us not against us.

If they are working for us, why is everything they have is better than we have.

REMEMBER YOU ONLY HAVE 8 MONTHS LEFT IF YOU VOTE YES PLEASE START LISTENING TO THE PEOPLE .

Erin, what's interesting to me is that amid all the debates about health care reform (which, frankly, I can barely comprehend), the bill's sweeping changes to the student-loan system aren't getting much notice. I spotted this in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Ed:

"The bill eliminates $9-billion that had been approved in the House version to reduce the interest rate on federally subsidized loans in 2012-13 and subsequent years. That rate is now due to drop to 4.5 percent for the 2010-11 academic year and 3.4 percent the following year, but then rise to 6.8 percent after that."

As someone who harangues his humanities undergrads about the importance of financial literacy, I suspect few students or their parents understand that this health-care bill also affects the cost of college. They'll get a bit of a reprieve for a couple years, but then their rate will shoot back up. Here's hoping that borrowers do the math and see that timing matters; deferring or opting for income-sensitive repayment at the wrong time could later cost them thousands.

Healthcare - yes
Obama care - NO!!!!!