Watch this "commercial" by Bill Maher. The AMA will hate it - particularly because it is true, just exaggerated.
Also, Digby makes an excellent point about this "greatest health care system in the world." Free lancers, students, and self-employed individuals have to avoid going to the doctor because if the doctor finds something that is recorded as a "preexisting condition" and you then move out of state or even just out of the network area, you are dropped by your old insurance company and have to find a new one in that great free market that McCain was going to throw us all into.
If you have a preexisting condition on your record then even if you can find new insurance then the premiums will be sharply jacked up. Very frequently that means people are trapped in one location or job just to keep their health insurance.
Universal health insurance with a single rating pool and with everyone paying into the system whether they are healthy or not ends that, even with private insurance companies. It's just that everyone pays and since everyone is in the same universal rating pool, preexisting conditions do not exist. Neither do jacked-up premiums, since the insurance company does not have to ensure that they are only administering insurance and paying for people in their own private rating pool.
The insurance companies, even in a private system, are paid on a per-capita basis. They collect the same premium as every other insurance company per person insured. If someone is especially expensive, then the individual companies themselves pay for loss insurance for themselves. Excessive losses are "reinsured." It's like a gambling casino. For a pool large enough, the losses are quite predictable.
Of course, the high executive salaries are no longer justified. That's why they want to kill universal health care and leave 50 million Americans uninsured. They make much bigger profits that way.
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