What a freakin' bummer! Good luck, Bobert, with that appeal ~ but cynic that I am, I ain't holding my breath for you. (Sorry!)

The self-employed, and the employees and owner/operators of small businesses, are simply screwed when it comes to health coverage in the US. Employees of the largest corporations, on the other hand, enjoy top-notch coverage at little or no expense.

Why? Because "hospitalization" (as it used to be called) was once-upon-a-time a luxury, back when most working folks could easily afford most of the medical care that was available and that they needed. Medical insurance was a luxury that employers offered as a "fringe" benefit along with just a few elite positions.

The definition of one's co-workers as one's "group" for health-insurance purposes no longer serves any meaningful purpose, and certainly does not serve justice.

Arguing that the current system is absurd, unjust, and in need of a complete overhaul is not equivalent to a call for Stalinist statism, nor indeed for carbon-copying any other nation's current solution to this problem. America is still the world's most "advanced" society, for good and for ill, hanging out further into the future than anyone else, and must take responsibility for devising a way for citizens to enjoy access to basic health care and for medical professionals to get paid.

Of course, any meaningful refrom would also undoubtedly eliminate some medical-paperwork jobs, but that will be the cost of progress ~ God knows plenty of jobs are always disappearing due to technological progress and other reasons, and constant creation of new jobs is just another part of what modern society needs to do.

Any big-business employee who actually believes he or she deserves health coverage vastly superior to that available to most other working Americans certainly suffers from head-up-the-ass syndrome. (Didn't someone recently coin a word for this condition?) A bit of self-congratulation for putting oneself into such an advantageous position is understandable and not really out of line, but you have to be crazy to believe that the pencil-pushing and wheel-spinning one performs as a cog in the military-industrial machine is in any sense more worthwhile than the truly productive and job-creating efforts that take place in the small-business/entrepreneurial sector.