Whatever Health Insurance Reform comes from all this, it's got to be just the start, and at least we'll have established that (almost) everyone gets covered one way or another, and they can't exclude preexisting conditions, nor cancel your insurance when you get sick.

But we have to learn to demand what every other advanced country seems to have agreed on: Health care can be universal, of higher quality than we have here, and it can cost at least HALF of what we currently pay, and certainly shouldn't be costing more! If you lived in Germany or France or England or Japan, you'd pay something like $400/year/individual or $800/year/family. How they do it should be studied and emulated, not just ignored. I'll send you links to back up any of this if you send me a private message.

Social Insurance, the concept, is very broad. You don't buy Police Insurance so you have the right to call a cop when you're in trouble; you don't buy Air Traffic Control Insurance so that you can get on a plane that's guided by a professional tracker; you buy Fire Insurance and hope you don't have your house burn down so that your premiums pay for the unlucky ones whose houses catch fire. We send our money to New Orleans or Haiti to help people who suffer huge catastrophes. Why is someone getting breast cancer less of a catastrophe than having a hurricane strike or an earthquake? Corporations with limited liability form so that investors can pool their resources and not suffer personal bankruptcy if the business goes down. That's all social insurance, and even Friedrich Hayek, the conservative economist, saw no reason we shouldn't have it as broadly as possible. Even Margaret Thatcher didn't try to repeal England's social medicine.

So, vote for Coakley just to preserve the 60-Senate-vote majority; no Republican can be trusted to even begin to foster social insurance now. And if she loses, the Democrats should still use every trick in the book to ram Health Reform through as it is, as a start, and we must work like hell to start getting more for ourselves, improving it, as soon as we can.

If Health Reform fails now, your insurance rates will just escalate to monstrous unaffordability soon anyway, and we'll be screaming for Medicare for All perhaps sooner than we think!