On drums...

At the risk of riling those unregenerate Free Marketeers among us, I think one positive aspect of the health care bill is that it could be the foot-in-the-door to Single Payer that the right is prophesying, with dire fear and trembling, as the end of life, liberty and the Amurrican Way!
My response to them: If only!

That's a fairly loaded paragraph, Ron. Would you care to illuminate what you mean by "Amurrican?"

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Gregory

Actually, it's more properly, 'murcan', as in, "That socialist, commie, fascist, Muslim in the White House is out to destroy our GOD GIVEN MURCAN WAY!
The great historian of the United States, Gore Vidal, uses the term, "United Statesers", sardonically to point out the mindless, solipsistic chauvinism endemic to the U.S.A., where most people use "America" and "American" as if the U.S.A. were the only country in a tri-continental hemisphere of many other countries... as if it were the only country of any account.
It's as if a Swede were to mean Sweden only by the use of the word "Europe". Wouldn't that be demeaning to an Italian, say?

But I love my country, anyway. Besides, I'm too old, lazy and comfortable to emigrate.

Did I answer your question, Greg?

I don't think so, but it sounds a lot like I used to sound... about people I didn't know.

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Gregory

I hope nobody here takes my attempts at humor personally. I go all provocative every now and then, as Greg has seen.

One of the guys in my newer band is a retired doctor. One of the friends my wife goes to the gym with is a doctors wife.
They both say doctors in general will be filing out in droves with this health care bill.
Guitar player said he retired as soon as Obama got elected.

Kelly, thanks for that. There's nothing more valuable to forming an enlightened opinion than spreading biased gossip and hearsay.

If the only possible enlightened opinion is one's own, then any impulse or evidence to the contrary is, naturally, the mere spreading of biassed gossip or hearsay... or in the current parlance, "misinformation."

In fact, what Kelly gave is anecdotal evidence, not meant to be empirical evidence or even opinion.

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Gregory

Here's a little 'anecdotal evidence' for ya'll; I personally know a few doctors who strongly advocate Single Payer and look with favor on Western European health care systems.
The AMA endorses the Healthcare bill just passed... I don't. To my mind, it's a craven, corrupt giveaway to big Insurance & big Pharma.
I know it's a long shot, but I think it would be great if this misbegotten bill really were the 'foot-in-the-door' to single payer-not for profit medicine.
On the other hand, I'm sitting pretty now that I'm on Medicare... you know, the program that St. Ronnie considered would be the end of the 'Murcan Way'.
In 1961, then private citizen Ronald Reagan recorded an LP for the AMA to protest Medicare which was distributed across the country. In it, he describes the Medicare bill as threatening the very fabric of American life.

“We do not want socialized medicine…behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Norman Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism…We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
http://www.larrydewitt.net/Essays/Reagan.htm

Here's more biased opinion: Ronald Reagan was a criminal and a hapless stooge who kicked off the economic disaster in which our society now finds itself.

Now I'm going to try to exercise self-control and make this my last post on this thread.

Ron

Have at it Ron.

The woman she goes to the gym with says she sits in on these Medical boards with her husband and says it's the majority of the doctors that are seeing it as a bad thing for them.