Obama and Sebelius, a big let down on health care reform.

Obama’s proposal focuses on three components — expanding coverage, improving quality and lowering costs — rather than the single-payer universal coverage many critics of the current system want. The details are to be worked out by Congress.

“On health care reform, the American people are too often offered two extremes — government-run health care with higher taxes or letting the insurance companies operate without rules,” said a White House spokesperson. “To that end, the forum will be a critical first step toward finding a middle ground.”

I didn't know enough about Gov. Sebelius when she was nominated to know whether she would champion true Universal Health Care, the way Gov. Dean would.
Now we know. It's off the table and we will end up with a watered down half measure that will not solve the problems. This is the same as Obama's unwillingness to consider nationalizing the banks. I don't know if he simply is opposed to any idea that looks like "socialism" or just doesn't want to have that big a political fight and just continue to look like a "moderate". Well those moderate solutions don't work. We are too deep in sh*t now.
Please do not ask me to "give it time" when the best solutions are discounted, the results will not work no matter how much time we wait, and the problems will only grow.
I am displeased with what I see and am not optimistic about our prospects. I guess I should not have had the audacity of hope.

as part of the answer:
"The American people will preferentially choose Medicare, but not all of them will choose Medicare. So we will have a hybrid system. Many more people will be in a public sector because it will probably be better for them. But they will only be in the public sector if they want to be, and they can get out of the public sector if they choose to try something different later on. That seems fair to me. I don’t think we should impose a single payer on everybody, but I do think we should give Americans the choice of having one if they like it. If it works for them, that’s what they’ll choose; if it doesn’t work for them, they’ll choose the private sector. But I don’t buy that the private sector has a right to compete and be more inefficient. I don’t think anybody has a right to serve people worse than somebody else just because they’re private sector."

:rofl:

The Universale Health Care idea is only the best solution in your opinion. I'm glad Obama isn't going from one extreme to the other.

Without fixing the problems in our current system, going straight to UHC would be just as big of a nightmare as we've got now.

...it could be two steps forward, two steps back.

Big Insurance has the ability to tell your doctor to withhold certain forms of treatment. Sometimes it's for valid reasons like the inability to find definitive proof in peer-reviewed clinical trials that a certain procedure works. But a lot of the time, it's for reasons such as "our policy no longer covers pharmaceuticals from A-Corp, so we're going to put you on inferior medicines from B-Corp instead."

they aren't going to try just as hard to NOT pay people's claims and to withhold certain forms of treatment?

It's still going to be based on a bottom line, influenced by lobbyists, steered to the friends of whoever is running it, etc.

UHC isnt going to automatically mean that everyone gets all of their claims paid for whatever they want and for whatever reason and treatment they want.

Yes, single-payer is the best way to go. No, that does not mean that any improvement to our heath-care system that isn't single-payer is a "let down." First, any improvement will help millions of Americans, and second, how can you be let down by something Obama said he'd do all along? A "let down" implies, you know, that he failed to meet expectations. If you were expecting him to give you single-payer in his first year, you weren't paying attention.