First off, my only argument was that the comments like "Unicorns! Cotton-candy clouds!! Magic ponies!!!" and "Beam me up" in response to Clyburn's quote were unjustified. Sure, it is far from the whole picture and far from the entire argument that one might make to support this reform, but it is not hocus pocus or nonsense.

You can argue that the positive effect of a shift from the ER to elsewhere will not entirely offset the total costs of the reform (of course it wont, it is one single effect of many that could offset costs) but you can't argue that said shift is not a positive one.

To Kris, I never said the insured don't have to pay in the ER, I said it is overcrowded, in part, because of uninsured people having to use it after waiting until their condition is urgent and expensive to deal with, and those costs are passed on to the taxpayer.

One of the best parts of the bill is its ability to shift care towards preventative medicine with screenings couple with Obama's interest in increasing primary care. In our system, even insured people wait too long and encounter catastrophic injury that costs much more than dealing with an issue early on (preventative medicine). The costs of that care greatly increase the financial pressures on the system, which in turn contributes to the ballooning costs to the consumer that both liberals and conservatives want to avoid.

The bill promotes the much needed solution to this problem, preventative care, in a way that no un-regulated free-market system can ***(see side note below)*** I agree that the free-market approach is great in areas like business, and may indeed reduce prices, but health is a different animal. It involves not just premium prices but long term consequences and lives. No matter how you slice it, an unregulated profit-based system does not have the patient's best interests at heart. That sort of system may indeed reduce prices, but that is the only thing it will do. In our such a system, the economic incentives encourage insurance companies to AVOID providing care and AVOID healing patients (dropping them from policies or refusing them in the first place, etc). There is very little incentive for either patients or insurance companies to engage in preventative care, which results in perhaps the largest but hardest to quantify reduction in costs: people not getting sick (or as seriously sick) in the first place.

***(note: we should clear up the misunderstanding that the proposed system is some kind of government takeover - outside of medicare, your doctors are still paid by you or private insurance companies and most hospitals are still privately run, and there IS competition to reduce prices in the insurance exchanges in each state. Its not perfect - I agree employer based care sucks and mucks up the competitive process - but we are working with what we have, and it is still largely a competition based system we end up with. Opponents of the bill can't seem to remember that there is no public option! This is not single payer healthcare! This is much-needed, ethical regulation of a free market system.)

Running out of time and energy but its not only the "advocates" that say it will reduce the deficit. It is the NONPARTISAN CBO. Do you think republicans dont use CBO estimates for their bills? Do you think they would say the numbers are doctored if it were much higher and allowed them to attack the bill? No. They would accept it as the closest thing we have to unbiased fact, which is what it is. Of course costs could be higher than projected. Its an estimate, not a record in a history book. If the legislation is carried through to completion, I think there is a very good chance it could meet those estimates. The problem is that congress will have to enact some taxes and they may lose the balls to do that. If that happens, of course the costs wont be offset, because those small tax increases are one important part of many things that are used to offset costs. And I know conservatives dont like any taxes at all, but if you look at how the plan is funded it is a pretty reasonable distribution of cost-offsetting measures : http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/20/news/economy/cbo_reconciliation/

Less than one percent increase in income tax and ONLY on the wealthiest individuals (plus a 3.8% tax on investment income) and most other measures are things like fees to insurance companies etc. which I dont see as a big problem. The "CLASS" program I do not like fiscally but nothing is perfect.

Yes, I said it! This is an imperfect bill but it makes some groundbreaking improvements. I wish we could scrap the whole system and start over with something like whats explained in "Healthcare Guaranteed" (Ezekiel Emmanuel) but thats not gonna happen. Bottom line, if this doesn't pass no significant reform will happen for another decade and then we will REALLY be screwed. This can still be tinkered with and perfected but the abuse of patients by insurance companies must be addressed and this bill will do that.