You did nothing wrong, I just wasn’t online to moderate comments between yesterday evening and just now. Most times I don’t check my site during workdays because I’m at work and I don’t maintain moderator access to it from my work computer.

Hope that clears this up for you any anyone else who leaves comments.

The controversy, issues, questions and costs of ‘healthcare’ affect every person in the United States (citizen, illegal or other status). I liked your analogy to 6-degrees-to-Kevin-Bacon – most national issues relate to ‘healthcare’; education, military spending; border control to name a few. Multiple semantic gymnastics have contributed to the vortex fallacy that ‘healthcare’ is a right. Using the term ‘healthcare’ for medical care misrepresents the services of physicians. And yet, physicians are the traditional entry point for care. Physicians have held onto traditional power in services – prolonging a praternalistic attitude toward patients and promoting learned helplessness among patients. Why should patients take responsibility for their own health if it is the doctor’s job to cure them? Back to semantics, using ‘medical care’ over medicine also contributes to the afformentioned line of thinking. Why should patients take responsibility for their own health if it is the doctor’s job to take care of them?

Unfortunately, physicians as a group did not ‘mind the store’ well for managing the business end of medicine. When private insurance became the responsibility of the employer – when it began to appear that someone else paid for medicine – parallel in timing to the idea that the government should form a safety net for the unfortunate poor (disabled, minority, young) health became someone else’s responsibility.

While all are affected in some way, individuals who have chronic, permanent or progressive conditions/illnesses display the dysfunction of any government-sponsored ‘healthcare’. These people LIVE in the ‘healthcare’ world, interacting with multiple physicians, other providers and insurers on a regular basis. I specifically speak to parents of children with disabilities through my blogsite http://www.therextras.com. In small bytes, I hope to help some of them through the medical maze currently in place.