Absolutely right. You know, if you were not married and a couple of continents away, I'd be in serious danger of falling for you. 8-)

Seriously, the plan as forced through Congress by the Democrats is insanely complex and has all the makings of a coming failure. But that is no reason to become hysterical about the principle of state-run health care. It took me about a hundred rounds of mutual insults before I could get superversive to understand that I am not scared of the State because we have in Italy a thing called Administrative Justice - a branch of the magistracy with equal dignity and power to civil and criminal justice - to which any citizen who is dissatisfied with State provision or performance can appeal. And his argument was - in the USA there is no such thing, so to create a national health system would be dangerous. Which sounds to me like saying: because we have a state system that needs reform - perhaps by inventing something like Administrative Justice, perhaps by some other means - we do not dare reform a health system that needs reform. It is using one evil to support another, in the final expectation that both shall endure and worsen. And there I thought that one of the points of democracy was to allow reform.