Lefties live blogging the Obama speech on Wednesday.

This is an interesting blog sequence with Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer and several others including doctors. The reaction is quite negative overall. Although most liberals who supported Obama in his campaign will continue to support anything that Obama is able to pass on the principle that some reform is better than none, other leftists think, as does Henwood ,that Obama's reform is just another big giveaway to vested interests. Obama's view that he will be the last president to deal with U.S. health reform--because he is going to get it done-- is arrogant and plain wrong. To find an equally arrogant and stupid comment one could cite Glenn BeckGlenn Beck's remark that the U.S. health care system was the best in the world even though it sucks. At least Beck was partly right! NOTE: WHO ranks the U.S. as 37th out of 190. France was ranked number one. These rankings are disputed of course and out of date but I have never seen a ranking that put the US at the top overall.

""Doug Henwood 6:29 pm on September 9, 2009 | 0 | # |

A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization-the value of all the outstanding stock-of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs' decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we'd save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.

In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

Will Obama propose anything like that? Of course not. Instead, he's going to propose that Americans be required to buy insurance, probably with some government subsidies. So instead of euthanizing the private insurance industry, Obama & the Dems are going to provide them with tens of millions of new customers-compelled to buy their product by law, and with some degree of public subsidy. That's lunacy.""