Noise

Some disturbing news from my hometown, where a fistfight ended a town hall meeting on healthcare reform.

A lot of the negative commentary below the article centers on buzzwords -- socialism, 'Dimocrats', welfare, freedom vs. tyranny -- that I'm not really interested in. Where health care is concerned, I don't care which party wins a legislative victory, or whether a policy is capitalist/socialist, or any of that. Here's what I care about:

1) I don't have the money to get insurance from anyone except my school. I have never had enough money to get insurance from anyone except an employer; I probably never will.

2) I do not trust the insurance company my school has hired. I have never trusted an insurance company, and I have never seen or heard stories about an insurance company acting selflessly in the best interests of its clients.*

3) I want something else. I want a health insurance system that is not based on corporate profits, where I'm not working against a large, parasitic industry designed to extract as much money as possible from me. I see the public option as the best way to escape their control.

That's what's important to me. To my mind, the rest of it -- the partisan bickering, the resentment towards Obama, the screaming, the noise -- it's not good for anybody except the insurance companies.



* Feel free to leave counterexamples in the comments! There has to be, somewhere, one good and helpful private provider of health insurance, and I would like to know their name.