Regarding “Others should be ashamed”:

Obamacare may be a terribly flawed piece of legislation, but you have to start somewhere. Nobody promised that getting a good health bill and changing the existing dollar flow in healthcare in the U.S. would be easy. Australia passed four major health bills in the process of getting it mostly right.

All the “cuts” that are discussed in “health reform” are someone's income. Some 70% to 75% of the $2.5 trillion being spent on healthcare this year is someone's income.

A major factor in the cost bloat is the way health insurance is bought and how those insurers reimburse providers for care.

A second factor that nobody will touch is that there are tens of thousands of executives, administrators, physicians and proprietary health providers that are terribly overpaid—particularly when looking at the compensation of these professionals/providers in other parts of the Western world.

Lawyers balk at tort reform—because it hits them. All this talk about patients' rights being abridged is nonsense. It is about fees. Same issue with single payer and the damage it would have on the vastly reduced numbers of employees in the finance offices of hospitals, physician groups and insurers. Not to mention how single payer would affect physician incomes.

And that is really what the fight in Washington is all about: incomes and protection of same. And so far the president has collapsed to every special interest that wants to retain the status quo. That is not likely to change any time soon.

Mark D. Olson
Sawyier & Williams
Chicago