Well, I'm glad we agree on most of it, Pat. I thought the great thing about Mr. Reid's talk was he explained that we don't have to do this through the Single-payer option and he gave examples of how other countries provide healthcare in different ways. We have Single-payer healthcare in Medicare already and so we have an example right here in the United States we can examine. Honestly no, I don't think our system has to go 100% Single-payer and I doubt we could ever get that done here so we should look at the other options available but it can be done. The whole point of Mr. Reid's talk is there are systems that are working in other countries all over the world and so all these scare tactics the insurance companies are using are bullshit. I don't think if we did go Single-payer it would bankrupt our country, I do think it would be difficult to do. Our country is a lot like a person with no insurance, we seem to be waiting until we are in critical condition and have to be rushed to the emergency room before we will deal with what ails us. I think this is why we get very worked up about these subjects, we just want to get the patient treatment before it's too late and sadly we got a lot of folks dragging their feet.

I just don't think bringing illegal immigrants into the discussion does any good here. You know why politicians are so brave about saying stuff about illegal immigrants, it's because they don't vote! They have no voice so the Tom Tancredo's of the world can spout off all they want about them and they know it won't hurt them. Sure, they can get called politically incorrect and be the punchline of jokes by liberals but they don't care about that because the Tom Tancredo's of the world know those liberals would never have voted for them anyway. So illegal immigrants are a safe target and any time a politician wants to oppose something he (or she) can find a way to work them into the dialogue because it will rile up the people he wants to rile up and the subject at hand gets buried behind a wall of noise about "illegals getting free care" rather than real discussion about fixing the system. This really is the reason they have brought illegal immigrants into the healthcare debate because people would not oppose a better healthcare system but they will bitch about illegal immigrants...it's all political sleight of hand.

The sad thing is one side does not want to let the other side look good either, because that costs them votes and our election cycle is now never ending. If Obama did have the greatest healthcare plan in the world and everybody knew it, the Republicans would still need to find a way to make that plan look bad because if the Democrats "win" on the issue and make people's lives better that totally screws the Republicans. I'm not saying the Democrats would not do the same thing but the key here is we have to be able to recognize when this is happening. Sometimes it's easy to see, like when people inject illegal immigrants into the healthcare debate. Sometimes it's hard to see, like when the government bails out Wall Street and the situation is so complex the average Joe has a real hard time knowing what the right thing to do is, then everybody can bullshit us and we have no idea what is what...that's when it gets real dangerous.