Fineas, the so-called “public option” is not what is needed. The problem with health care is that it has not been a free market enterprise for some time. Overregulation and government mandates for coverage have made health insurance anything but a form of insurance.

Solutions? Require everyone in America to have at least catastrophic coverage that each person pays for in premiums. Let people cover and pay for their own risks. Enable the use of tax-free med savings accounts that have some provisions of preventative care attached to maintain their tax-free status.

The present system is based upon a WWII-era model in which Kaiser gave out “health insurance” to its employees to boost salaries during a time of government-controlled employee pay (the gov’t wanted to devote human resources to war production as it saw necessary and didn’t want there to be competition between employers for employees).

We need to quit seeing health “insurance” as an entitlement or as a benefit. By all means, we should help those who honestly cannot afford coverage, but we should also arrange a system where everyone pays into a system that he or she will eventually end up using. We pay thousands of dollars in car and homeowners’ insurance based on formulations of risk spread out over a lifetime of the policy — why should health insurance be any different?