Amos, please don't lose sight of the fact that I do want Mr Obama's bill to pass, okay? ;-) I agree that any small step forward is better than no step forward.

I am simply drawing attention to the perfidy of the powerful private industry which has unduly influenced the process much for the worse.

The joy I have is that I do live in a country where we have an affordable, government-run, single payer national health plan, and it costs me less than a thousand a year. If I had been living in the USA when my father got liver disease, I and my parents would have been bankrupted by the treatment he got. We'd have lost our savings, our house, everything.

Living in Canada, we simply lost my father (whose eventual death was inevitable).