ok i wanna be fair to Obama.

Here's what an health insurance exchange is: (according to the Henry j. Kaiser Family Foundation)
http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/7908.pdf

1. offering consumers a choice of health plans and focusing competition on price
2. providing information to consumers
3. creating and administrative mechanism for enrollment.
4. moving towards portability of coverage
5. reforming the insurance market.

I'm skeptical of spelling on the interwebs.

Moving this video to marinara's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

So, the problem with medical costs rising is because it is a private industry? So, unlike nearly ever single other industry on the planet dealing with services, costs will rise with medicine because it is in private hands. That makes no since, and begs the actual answer to the question, why is does it behave that why...if in fact it is behaving that way at all.

Building a house is a very complex thing. Wiring, insulation, foundation, structure, are just a few of the numerous components that specialists install. But, house building in the USA is a completely streamlined, relatively inexpensive thing. Houses, like medical care, are at the very base of the Maslow's Hierarchy. So this isn't a case of a dear good being horded to the loss of all. IMO, the problem remains with the intractable slowness of government and an inability to act in a disinterested way. Meaning, they are ALWAYS going to write laws in a way that there is a winner and a loser, and always be so cumbersome in adapting to the rapid changing medical situation at hand. The same can't be said for normal economic activities. When I buy a house that I like for the price I wanted I feel as much a winner as all those who got paid to make it.

Not to say that the situation of insurance and hospitals even work right now. But legislating this form of care only provides incentive to this system, which may not be the best system to use. Legislation in this critical area of life will only slowdown, derail, hijack, make more costly, overlook, overshadow, real solutions. It is the same reason you don't want the government regulating (and by regulation in this since I mean overseeing the business process) how cars are made, or steal is poured, or food is eaten, or marriage is conducted.

As an aside, I really do wonder why there are no non-profit health insurance companies, like credit unions of health care. Seems like a good idea, has it been done, or does it already exist?

Edit: In reading this back to myself, it sounds overly negative. I like a lot of what this lady had to say, but I just disagree with her diagnosis of the MAIN problem. She seems smart, and non-dogmatic, and I like that; just think she is a bit off the mark.

"Our health care system is based on the premise that health care is a commodity like VCRs or computers and that it should be distributed according to the ability to pay in the same way that consumer goods are. That's not what health care should be. Health care is a need; it's not a commodity, and it should be distributed according to need. If you're very sick, you should have a lot of it. If you're not sick, you shouldn't have a lot of it. But this should be seen as a personal, individual need, not as a commodity to be distributed like other marketplace commodities. That is a fundamental mistake in the way this country, and only this country, looks at health care. And that market ideology is what has made the health care system so dreadful, so bad at what it does."

-Dr. Marcia Angell

I disagree with this statement so much. Markets made computers, cars, new commercial rocket vehicles, beer, houses, nearly everything you consume. Not only that, but even things that are needs, like food and housing, are market driven; and yet prices go down and down. Medicine isn't inexpensive, even if it is was "free". The costs of X number of doctors being payed Y dollars a year in Z number of hospitals isn't going away just because it would hypothetically be controlled by the state. If the state were to seize medicine in the US, it would remove it from the forces that have made cars, rockets, beer, and every other commodity great. Government is the path to rot and stagnation. If you want good health, you do not want someone making decisions on it on a whim of being elected, you want him making it because he will only get paid if he does well...period.

i like what she says.
the health care bill that was passed is a band-aid, not a cure.

i wanted universal healthcare like in most other industrialized nations, or at the very least a public option.

but, i do feel that unless the political system is changed (the money flow from corporate interests to policy makers at all levels), i don't know how realistic that is...

well, we can always move to canada or europe =)