Yes, I can buy health plan on my own. It will be factor of about 3 more expensive, and will provide me much less security. The ugly truth with on-your-own plans is that your insurance can decide to drop you if your care becomes too expensive. There’s been quite a few articles in the press about things like this, some of them in Illinois where you Gaius seem to reside.

Try finding out before buying a plan what is covered and what is not. It is absolutely impossible. I have Type I (autoimmune) diabetes, and trust me, I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide what is the best option for me. I have a PhD in nuclear physics and IQ of 160, and after reading hundreds of pages and being on hold for dozens of hours I could not get inofrmation about, just to give an example, what insulin pumps are covered – and if they are covered at all. The idea is simple – spend most of the money making gimmicky pamphlets and create hundreds of unnecessary choices with the only goal of confusing the customers. There were reports that companies actually spend quite a bit of money researching the best ways to confuse the customers. The most recent example (although not in the health-care) was AT&T, just a year or so ago.

Don’t believe it? Look at Canada. Those who can afford it flee that system for treatment in the US.

I live in a medium-size college town. I have two choices for health insurance through my employer which as far as I can tell are identical. In either plan, I do not choose my doctors and there’s only one big hostpital in town anyway.

Choice?!

And even when I lived in Chicago the situation with HMO’s was pretty much the same. No Gaius, there is no choice in the current system either.

Folks should keep that in mind when they say, “At least McCain will not be as bad as either Hillary or Obama.”