Thats a pretty good example. Picture this. You are in a car crash and get a whiplash injury (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiplash_%28medicine%29 yes, wikipedia know well enough what a whiplash injury is).

The result is a fracture in the neck region which leads to headache and neuropathic pain while moving. So your insurance may be willing to pay for the costs.

The only problem is that often the fracture heals but the pain doesnt go away. You will need to continuously go through therapy to be able to function and you may still not be able to work full time anymore (not at all uncommon).

Now you tell the insurance company that you are not fine yet and need more medical care and especially, money for it. They on the other hand say: "take a look at the x-rays and the MRIs, youre fine". You cant say anything more because altgough you know you are not fine, all the tests indicate that there is nothing wrong with you..

Now you say well i had such a good job that my money will do just fine. Sorry to dissappoint but it isnt that cheap..

Then if you say something like Lugh (i think it was Lugh): i would have died but its okay, if i cant take care of myself then i deserve to die. Well i cant say anything if you really think that way.. But if you have children what then?

Just think about this for a while. Even in Finland where you get everything almost for free if you otherwise cant afford it this scenario is totally possible. Heck, i saw a man who had to sell his house to be able to afford his medical care. When that money is gone what then?

Well, you see that's *EXACTLY* what i "hate" about you; uselessly provocative & judging anyone for your own personal fun (i'm guessing).  It's the attitude not the economy, buddy. It's the tolerance not the superiority complex, forum user. It's the respect not the Ego.

The free market IS responsible for the rising costs of health care for an extremely vast majority of even employed Americans -- not the government. Even attempts at reform can't change the facts & the current situation. Now, if US citizens are too stubborn to admit they can't be fiscally aware of their bad spending habits, nobody smart enough could prove it to them. Control, liberty, individualism -- go ahead and try finding yourselves a f**en desert island and plug your toys in free electrical outlets while slowly starving to death from permanent lack of necessary supplies. Don't brake a foot on slippery rock piles though, cuz it won't cure if infection spreads. Surviving skills, duh; you watch to much TeeVee, plugged.

Society is a device that serves all without exception.

Properly devised financial intervention against abusive corporations **MIGHT** be a solution. As of today.

Strict non-profit principles for medical policies in general (be it publicly, partially, privately managed or not, btw), another.

Less luxury, one more.

IMHO.

I never suggested such things.

I did not say that we can control the situation under which we are born, or chance events that may complicate our lives. I did say, however, that it would be foolish to leave our circumstances to external forces because we feel powerless against them, a position that you appear to support. If you deny the individual the ability to make his own destiny, you deny humanity its greatest asset: freedom of being.

Also, we may be unable to prevent certain events, but we can reduce the chances under which they can occur. For example, defensive driving can save a driver from a drunk who runs a red light.

The Constitution was deliberately written with truck-sized holes in it because most of the framers were smart enough to understand that they had no idea how the nation would look when it had grown to occupy most the continent with an unimaginably large population. In particular, the commerce clause has been a mighty blunt instrument in the hands of both corpratists and populists, yielding a panoply of policies that have done everything from protecting sweatshop and child labor in the 19th century, establishing national markets for 'trustworthy food and drugs' at the turn of the last century, to basically eliminating child labor during the Great Depression.

The deliberate 'trickiness' of it all is plain in the Preamble, which asserts, among other things, that the national government is intended to "...promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty." An absolutist welfare state would be unduly authoritarian, but absolute liberty is a synonym for anarchy, and anarchy won't work until the species has evolved enough to stop forming gangs who use violence to gain power over others.

The commerce clause is a myth, the original, and applicable definition is to make regular.  There is nothing necessary or proper in the morass of bullshit we have clogging up interstate trade these days, it's the opposite of regular.  You can make up truck sized holes by pretending it says something else, but the only truck sized holes they left in it were the lack of term limits and a set number of judges on the SCOTUS.

Zyx, you can call me names all you want, but you're still willfully wrong.

You may know plenty about health care, but you know dick about the regulatory history of health care in the US.  Most of the insurance companies that exist today were directly created by Uncle.  The way the insurance companies operate with regards to cost controls are due to the structures Uncle used when creating them.  They were an attempt to control costs by Uncle.  There are reprehensible barriers to entry on new competitors.  There is no free market.

Earlier in the century, Blue Cross was created by a cabal of hospitals in combination with state legislation enacted to exempt them from the rules other insurance companies had to follow.  The stated purpose was to decrease competition between hospitals.  Score one for the government supported monopolist mindset.

Blue Cross then saw too much competition after proving the existence of the market, private insurance companies jumped in.  The hospitals were still protected from having to compete against each other, so everyone made a killing as the free market had been stripped from it.  Instead of what you're willing to pay versus what the hospital is willing to accept, it's what you can afford to pay versus what the hospital is willing to accept.

Then the sixties come along, Medicare and Medicaid are passed.  Oh look, more anti-competitive insurance systems that discourage competition by providing set prices!  I hate the sixties.  When someone else is paying your bills, you don't really give a fuck how much they cost, now do you?  Health care costs doubled in just a few years time, they then doubled again in a few more years time.

In the seventies, another decade I hate, Uncle brought about the dreaded HMO.  Oddly enough, a dreaded organization that nearly everyone liked by the time they killed their own monster to protect us.  The media is wonderfully dishonest.  The HMO system was created specifically to ration care, Medicare and Medicaid costs were increasing too fast, so they were attempting to shortcut the industry by reducing services.  These entities were established and run with the goal of denying services whenever possible.  Of course, most people aren't sick, thus didn't ever notice they were screwed if they got sick.  Those that were sick railed against the HMO's instead of the Congress that created them.

Which brings us to the present state of things, the HMO system was demolished, leaving all of those government created insurance agencies sitting around with nothing to do besides provide the same, anti-competitive insurance systems started by Blue Cross.  Thanks to more actions by Uncle, many people get their purposefully anti-competitive insurance through their place of employment, adding another layer of separation between the cost payer and the person recieving care.  Costs, predictably, go through the roof.

All of the above systems were explicitly pre-paid medical, instead of actual insurance that would cover catastrophic illness.

Now that I've provided the rough layout of insurance history in the US, I expect you'll ignore it and continue blaming free markets for something that hasn't been a free market.  You have two choices, leave fantasy land, or stay in it.  I'll find amusement either way so it's irrelevant to me.

For those of you that fly off the handle every time someone says the word fascist, this is another example of it.

I'll skip away straight ahead to the third if you don't mind... history lessons or interpretations of it aren't necessarily *A* truth found within anyone's fantasy including those propagated by your Uncle, wrong or right, moderate or extreme, false or biased to fit a personal agenda such as yours or even mine.

And leave.

Typical, dismiss without verifying anything that disagrees with you.

I say, let gov health care pass.

Then when no one can get a primary care doctor anymore and all the ER's are completely overwhelmed with petty cases, maybe someone (the right people - as in... The Powers That Be!) will get the point.

After all, it's not until you really hit rock bottom that you really make the right change. Either that, or you simply die.

Trouble is, once it is done it will be nearly impossible to get rid of it.

No I do not support that view. I specifically stated that we do have a measure of control over our lives but this control is not absolute. I was talking about chance and random bad events, not about things that we can actually help. I already mentioned the fact that although we can reduce the risk of accidents, we can't prevent them from happening.

This was simply a case of misunderstanding.