"Regional co-ops" are NOT the answer, unless you want Balkanized health care

Even if the government (you & I) "seed" the co-ops with money, they WILL fail.

"Lucy's Fashion Shop" may get an infusion of cash when she opens her store, but the Walmart down the street will put her out of business in the end.

Regional co-ops will do to health care delivery, what the union busting did to the Great Lakes states when industry moved south where "costs" were less. They left a whole region high & dry & jobless.

I live in an area where a co-op would be well-populated with doctors and there is still good access to hospitals & clinics, but what about other places?

Rural & small-town people will still be losers, because they don't have a big enough population to make a co-op really work. They would all have different rules too, so moving from one area of the country to another, would be a real crapshoot too.

Instead of adding more and more-complicated layers onto an already broken non-system, I cannot understand why they refuse to do the "simple" thing..

Let 50+ buy into medicare....extend SCHIP to age 25, and boost funding to medicaid for the 26-49ers with serious illness. Do this for a specified 10 year time frame, after which ALL will fold into medicare. No more VA (except for specialized rehab facilities), no more medicaid, no more private insurance vultures (except for the supplementals that cover the 20% gap).. This would mean that EVERYONE would have the same coverage,..even the congresscritters, and you can bet that if THEY have to use it, it will be okay

Health care reform needs to be simple enough to explain in a sixty second conversation... Like your health insurance company? Keep it. We'll even mandate no exclusions for pre-existing conditions. Now, if you're under 18, you can sign on to SCHIP and if you're over 50 you can sign on to Medicare.

Game, set, match.

The 1000+ pages are only there so congress members can wring the maximum payola out of their lobbyist buddies.