I wish I could phrase this more eloquently, but I am not in the mood.

HEY DEMS, GROW A PAIR!

I hope everyone realizes that this retreat was not caused by the yelling at town halls. Oh sure, the right will take credit, and maybe even get some blame later when people realize their healthcare is still screwed up and getting worse.
But this was about Congress being owned by the special interests. It's that simple. It's about Pelosi and Reid and all the rest of them selling out the People of the United States.
Ignore the spin because that is what happened.

I don't know how they got to President Obama but they did. The deal he cut with Big Pharma for a less than 2% reduction in their take was not a negotiation - it was a flat-out gift.

Once that happened, I sensed the corporate grip. But I still don't understand how President Obama would risk his life to do this and yet not be able to stand up to Big Pharma. That's a mystery to me.

One point made during this debate was particularly true: Many people are happy with their insurance because they haven't really been extremely sick yet. It is only then, that you get crushed financially and emotionally at the time when you are in the biggest battle of your life and need all the strength you can muster to deal with healing. That's when you find out.

Here's the secret for many people: Their health insurance is good but only if they stay in good health. If they get sick, it's another story.

My old friend, the late great James Shibley found this out the hard way. Faced with a serious illness, he and his wife spent much of their time dealing with the machine, and even though he had earned his health insurance for all those years, when he got sick the bills still rolled in by the tens of thousands.

I am increasingly pessimistic about America's ability to self-correct and change course. Wall Street sure hasn't.
But where we are going, it will not be our decision anymore. Our healthcare system - like our military empire and the national debt - is unsustainable and that hasn't changed one bit.

Wait 'til you see the crunch this time.

If there's a bright spot, this episode has allowed the egomaniac running Whole Foods to shoot himself in the foot again. I think he's got six toes left.

We already have government-run health care...Have had for quite some time. The problem is that it's run to benefit the doctors and lawyers, not patients.

If the politicians really cared about the patients they would give the health-care dollars to the patients, not to the health-care providers.

It's only a matter of time until the system collapses under its own weight.

Any huge, grand change is full of unknowns and unexpected problems. Why not just do reforms in small steps:

1. Remove ALL state mandates and allow any type of coverage that people want.

2. Allow interstate purchase of policies.

3. Severely punish misconduct by insurance companies.

4. Forbid termination of policies. Allow only suspension for non-payment until payment received; establish payment subsidies for the needy.

5. Require small co-pay for all insurance paid services.

6. Cover legal aliens. Cover illegal aliens that seek service, then deport them as soon as they are fit to travel. Offer free transport for family members to join them.

Thanks
JK

Bill - "Many people are happy with their insurance because they haven't really been extremely sick yet. It is only then, that you get crushed financially and emotionally at the time when you are in the biggest battle of your life and need all the strength you can muster to deal with healing".

True that

And people wonder why I am so cynical about all things political.... because we quit being a democracy more than a few decades ago and became a corpocracy (and yeah I make up words).

This co-op idea...I haven't really heard anybody explain what it means. The best I can figure, it's sort of like a credit union--does the same thing as regular insurance, but is owned by the customers and offers similar but slightly different services. Can anybody help me to understand it better? Thanks!

How did they get to Obama? Simple: "You like that big house in the center of Washington DC, with the private helicopter that flies you to your private 747? Want it for four more years?"

The same way they get to every politician. Soft money.

What we have here now is a system where 100% of the people get the best treatment in the world and 80%+ are happy with what coverage they have. Be honest now. Are you saying, Jack, you want to throw away the coverage you personally have now and hand it over to the same people who run the post office? People hear stories about other someone or someones somewhere else who don't have insurance, and their response to that is to say we must trash the whole system and hand it over to government. Say what?

Government funded single payer national health insurance would create a black hole that would suck the entire economy into it. If you think the cost of health care is high now, just wait until it's free. And even at that it would only cover the healthy people. Get sick --seriously sick-- and you can forget it friend.

This is why the proposal is going down win flames fore and aft. Wiser heads are prevailing. Instead of trying to slam a complete A to Z socialized medicine scheme into place they should be working to find a way yo cover the 15 to 20 percent of the folks out there who need coverage.

Everything will be just fine!
You will be able to watch Tom Delay on this season's "Dancing with the Stars" from your hospital bed! The doctors won't even have to 'pull the plug' for some of us; we will choose assisted suicide.

JK - great list, but you forgot one: Tort Reform. Bad Dr's should be punished, but the fear of a malpractice suit drives many Dr's to (among other things) order tests that are questionable and raises costs for us all.

Job security and money from lobbyist are the only two things that make politicians situp and take notice. 80% of the population (by polls) are happy with their coverage and they are telling the politicians their job is on the line. Toss in some money from lobbyists and this deal is dead, which is a good thing.

Instead of reinventing the wheel what we need is some grease in the bearings. Target the issues that are causing health costs to soar to fix the issue.

200,000 preventable deaths from negligence in our health care system annually, and you folks think the solution is tort reform? All we really need is to make hand washing a reimbursable medical procedure for doctors.

Interesting how the right-wing talking points come out and how transparently false they are. It is a lie that 80% of the population is happy with their coverage. Nearly that many favor reform. It is a lie, easily refuted, that we have the best health care in the world. It is only the world's most expensive. Health care reform may be dead, or it may just be on life support. If folks who care about it don't get out and protest like they're trying to kill your grandmother, we can't be surprised when the plug on reform gets pulled.

G Joubert:
I really hope you are very healthy and remain so. You may change your mind about 'insurance run health care' when you actually have to use it!
Both Medicare and the VA are very good systems and are run by our government for vastly less dollars per patient than the current mish mash of insurance run health systems.
I personally have received excellent care in a variety of countries that have various types of so called 'socialized medicine'. This has not always been the case here in the USA. When you are sick or injured you cannot always fight for what you need from some telephone screener at the insurance company from your hospital bed if you are fortunate enough to get one!
FYI, I have a relative who is an ER doc. and he tells me in some places, emergency room doctors do not receive any payment for patients who are uninsured. They treat them anyway.

The cognitive dissonance I find here is that folks who bemoan the ineptitude of our local government on a regular basis seem to have no problem handing mega-healthcare over to legions of underperforming bureaucrats. I submit that Portland's profligate spenders represent a microcosm of what state run healthcare would look like. Distrust of government, well-earned, is what killed the public option.

Yeah....if only we could follow Canada's example:

"SASKATOON — The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country's health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country - who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting - recognize that changes must be made.

"We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize," Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jbjzPEY0Y3bvRD335rGu_Z3KXoQw

We dislike Nader?

This might be a wake-up cal for Pres Obama. When you let a trio like Pelosi/Emanuel/Reid run your policy decisions, you don't really make it hard for the opposition.

You can blame the insurance sompanies, but we weren't exactly blanketed with anti-ads. I'll grant you the lobbying, but the stank in COngress was ther before Obama got there.

I don't disagree that reform is needed, and I'm not sick (at least I hope not), but I do disagree with the comments that you really know how bad private insurance is when you get sick. Both my parents are cancer survivors, who were diagnosed and treated in their late 50's. Their health insurance covered all of their treatments and their prescriptions, at virtually no cost to them. They did not suffer financially or emotionally as a result of their coverage - and they received top notch medical care. My father has lived far past his diagnosis - and we are grateful every day for the treatment he received, and continues to receive (now under Medicare - his oncologist won't take new Medicare patients but will continue to see his old patients).

Although I realize reform is needed to contain costs, I'm not interested in making big changes to a system that kept both my parents alive (and with good quality of life) so they could see their grandkids, and so my children could know their grandparents. They could not have received better care under a single payer system - it may have been identical, but it wouldn't be better, and I don't think it's worth the risk to find out.

Currently, however, my family (wife and kids) and I will receive the same level of care that my parents received should we face some type of catastrophic illness - why would I want to mess with that? I realize that many others will not have the same care as we will, and I am willing to pay more taxes to help out, but the welfare of my family comes before my concern for anyone else, and always will. Consequently, my whole family(siblings, spouses, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc)will oppose any plan that threatens the level of care we each receive right now. And we're a mixed bag politically (democrats, republicans, conservatives, progressives).

I'll bet you'd see a lot different debate if the benefits for our elected officials and their families were being threatened as a result of any of the proposals.

Wiser heads are prevailing.

Yes, it's a relief that Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin are calling the shots on this one.

You all realize that public "option" means what is says, right? That you would have the option of buying a public or a private plan? If you love your current insurance, keep it. If you hate it, switch. If you don't have any coverage, and you're low enough income to qualify for a subsidy, you'll be able to choose where to send your premium dollars. Employment-based health insurance is currently a monopoly. Why the opposition to allowing more choices? Why can't I CHOOSE to let the public bureaucrats control my health care (vs. the private sector insurance bureaucrats)?

Government run health care *might* be run like Medicare / VA or it *might* be more like the Post Office.

To those who argue for the former, think about this:

1. Medicare and the VA serve much smaller current populations that we are talking about (up to 46 million more involved).

2. Medicare and the VA are free from much of the procedural and structural obstacles that make private insurance difficult. They are generally run and have policy decisions made from one source (the federal gov't, rather than 50 individual states). They don't have to meet the same criteria that makes private insurance unworkable on a national scale.

3. Oh yeah, that small issue of a monopoly and a massive public subsidy helps, too.

There is a reason why UPS, FedEx, DHL, and others can beat the Post Office and make a profit - they are run more efficiently and play by the same set of federal rules. Why not open the doors and let the private insurers do the same? I am NOT suggesting deregulation, only consolidation of regulations just like we have for the auto industry / emissions, technology standards, education standards, etc. I'd gladly trade one big federal bureaucracy for the 50 bloated and inefficient state agencies.

The government screws up so many things that it touches (USPS, Amtrack, DMV, etc) that it scared me when they wanted to take over health care. Witness the poor job that they are doing (finance-wise) with social security, Medicare and Medicaid - all of which are heading towards insolvence in a major way. So no, with that track record, keep government away from my health care.

But my wife had a great idea. If Obama and the dems think that thier ideas on health care are so good (and they aren't). If they think the public option is the solution (and it isn't). Then all federal employees including the president, all 545 members of congress, anyone employed by the federal government needs to be put on that 'public option' starting tomorrow. No extra insurance from your spouse, if you are employed by the feds, your health insurance is the 'public option' starting tomorrow. There are enough employees and enough various cases that after a year or two of running that many folks through their system; the government will have finally found the potholes in thier system and they will have a MUCH better handle on how much it would cost.

Don't come at me with an unfinished bill and ask for my support. How about I ask you to sign this blank check and just trust that I'll do the right thing with it.

Miles -
"You all realize that public "option" means what is says, right? That you would have the option of buying a public or a private plan? If you love your current insurance, keep it. If you hate it, switch."

Um, actually, no - if you have insurance that your employer and he decides that paying 8% payroll tax is cheaper - then he dumps your insurance expense and you have NO OTHER CHOICE EXCEPT PUBLIC. Read the bill - if you lose your present insurance you end up on the public plan.

What should have happened should have been instead of trying to build this thing from the ground up, you find the places where it needed to be fixed and fix them. Things like allowing people to have basic insurance instead of forcing (like Oregon does) rules that state if a company offers a policy it has to include birth options (I'm way past that point in my life), it has to offer birth control and/or viagra options - maybe as an option but NOT a condition under which a policy has to be structured.

We need things like a fall back safety net for people who lose their jobs and thus lose their health insurance (when they get employed again, they are off the pathetic public option, and no, they can't stay on it once they are employed). They need to have a basic policy like car insurance and if you wish to add things to your insurance then you can. However, like car insurance we do all need the insurance. Maybe that 8% needs to go to each individual and they can purchase their own insurance rather than have the government choose it for us - or the employer choose it.

Sorry, while there need to be some changes the ones that the dems put out there were BAD ideas.

Senator Edward Everett Dirksen (speaking from Heaven):

"A trillion here, a trillion there, eventually it adds up to real money."

US Public Debt ($Billions)
Fiscal 2000: $5,674
Projected Fiscal 2009: $11,911

People always reference Medicare and the VA, but even I neglected FEHB (federal employees health benefit, I assume). I understand that federal employees and elected officials get a choice of a variety of insurance carriers that are allowed to offer on a national scale.

Costs seem to be much more reasonable, there is plenty of "choice" among the thieves, and the providers compete based on the government's own slate of criteria. They still make money, but the profits are essentially limited by their own efficiency models (since FEHB dictates what coverage must be part of the plans they offer).

Why can't that be the "option" that everyone in the "public" can buy into? I think more voters would be okay keeping the same level of coverage for a lower premium with the savings being diverted (perhaps by a tax) to cover those who are currently uninsured.

it's a relief that Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin are calling the shots on this one

Ahhh, the left's favorite boogeymen. Maybe Karl Rove too, eh? This seems to be as a result of such a groundswell that it's really hard to say this person or that person did it, but to the extent any one person gets the credit, Dick Armey, it is now being reported, deserves as much credit as anybody.

Health care reform is truly dead, because Barack Obama is desperate to get out of this debacle without having to admit he lost big time. Once he got into this, he realized he needed to get his ass out of it before going down in flames like Clinton.

Insurance companies and other giant corporations are truly our lords and masters.

Columbia County Kid,
I'm glad your parents had a great experience with their healthcare insurance. We should all be so fortunate.
I was careful to say for "many people" when I talked about finding out about the holes in their insurance after they got really sick.
Blue Oregon had something on this today: "Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10."

Not only did my friend face tens of thousands in bills within months of being diagnosed with a major medical problem - even though he had health insurance - but it was one long continuous decision-making process. Every step had to be researched with huge new deductibles for each procedure.

I believe at a certain point you care for the sick. You don't bankrupt them. If I'm going to be inundated by a bunch of people bragging about how Christian they are, I would appreciate it if at some point, they acted like it.

The ultimate irony is that stress damages the immune system. So by adding to the stress with all the paperwork, we are actually making the medical problems worse.

Our healthcare system is crazy. Let's be honest: If we want poor or middle class people to crawl away and die when they get sick, so be it. I'm sure that's driving part of this: "It will give them an incentive to try harder to be rich." I'm sure that's it.

But in exchange, I don't want to hear one more word about what a Christian nation this is. If we're not merciful to the sick then what's the point?

Mr. President,

We do not need any more politicians only concerned with getting re-elected. What we need is a hero. Please Mr. President, be a hero.

Never voting for any of these cowards again. Not one.

The fat lady has yet to sing and to mix sports sayings, it ain't over 'til it's over.

So stop what you are doing and e-mail the White House right now to tell Obama to keep the public option. I made it easy for you. Just click the link:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

I did that at 8 a.m. this morning and then put up the contact info on my Facebook page. I'd say the ripple of that alone resulted in over 100 e-mails to Obama to keep the public option.

If everyone who reads this blog does the same thing--and similar actions are taken around the nation--there may just be enough of a groundswell to give Obama the courage to stay with the public option.

Yeah, and the five minutes everyone spends doing this might now work. If so, you can go back to being cynical tomorrow.

Gil Johnson; Thank you!

Didn't anyone hear what Howard Dean said?? It's going to cost as more not to have people insured. Don't you all realize that whether or not someone is insured and they get very sick, they are going to go to the emergency room, and we all end up paying for it anyway. Case in point: my husband's niece who is 27 years old has been to the hospital twice for a week at a time due to alcohol poisoning (very unfortunate). But she racked up about $50,000 each time. Do you think a 27-year-old with no insurance and no job is going to pay that bill? Please.

Thanks for the reply Bill.

You'll get no argument from me about caring for the sick, which is why I indicated in my post that I am willing to pay more tax $ to provide increased coverage. I believe a healthy population, like an educated population, is a boon to our economy and our democracy. I don't think medical care is a fundamental right, but it provides benefits to all Americans.

But I think your comment goes too far in assuming that those of us who question the idea of single payer (we can't question a bill because neither the president nor congressional leaders have bothered to tell us what bill is actually going to move, which scares the hell out of me) want middle class and lower class families to die. I'm middle class and so are all of my friends. I don't want people to die or go bankrupt, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the level of care that my family enjoys to ensure that happens. I'll pay more taxes, but won't lower our health care. My family comes first for me before anything else. And I don't think I'm alone in those sentiments.

That's probably not very Christian of me, but I'm not Abraham, and have never claimed to be.

I don't think its possible to provide the coverage that my family currently enjoys to the entire population - I don't think our country and economy can afford it. And even if we could, I don't think the politicians have the guts to raise taxes to the level needed to provide that type of coverage to everyone. Even the president said he wouldn't raise middle class income taxes to pay for a health care plan in order to get elected - why is anyone surprised that he won't go out now and break his campaign promise?

Which means if you want health care reform, you better be prepared to take half a loaf. But we can't even begin to debate what constitutes "half a loaf" until the president and congressional leaders let us see a bill. That would beat the tar out of these "town hall" charades, where a few of the vast right wing conspiracy come to shout down the legislator who makes vague promises about how we'll all have everything we want for free upon passage of this sacred health plan that we can't fact check because there's no damned bill. It seems to me that you have to have a bill before you can have a debate on the bill, and the president and congress comes across as snake oil salesmen (and women) without one.

If our leaders won't provide the public (us) with the courtesy of letting us see and debate a bill, then they don't deserve to be our leaders anymore. I don't care what party they belong to.

Columbia County Kid,
Halfway through my reply to you I sort of drifted back towards others.
Sorry. Just another editing thing gone wrong.
I do think there is an attitude that people should just try harder to provide so they won't have to suffer. There's that feeling in this country - it's survival of the fittest.
UNLESS of course we're talking about the wealthy getting in trouble. Then we have to move heaven and earth to bail them out.
The most frustrating part of our healthcare system is the high cost of not doing it better.
It's all related. In the economic expansion from 2002 to 2007, two thirds of the entire new wealth went to the top 1%.
While we argue between right and left, it is a shocking transferral of wealth from bottom to top that is ruining America and destroying the middle class.
The whole thing's coming apart and everybody will feel it sooner or later. I think part of it could just be a blah feeling for a bunch of super-wealthy older people realizing they were handed a beautiful country to manage but instead they fleeced it and destroyed it, rather than pass it on even better to the next generation.

[cough] Paulson [cough]

if you have insurance that your employer and he decides that paying 8% payroll tax is cheaper - then he dumps your insurance expense and you have NO OTHER CHOICE EXCEPT PUBLIC. Read the bill - if you lose your present insurance you end up on the public plan.

This is false. The entire premise of Obama's health care reform is to create insurance exchanges, where you will be able to buy from an array of insurance products, including the public option. There is no automatic enrollment in public insurance for those who lose employer-sponsored insurance.

And you do realize that right now if your employer drops your coverage, the only option you have is to purchase in the individual market, right? Where you can be denied coverage for any preexisting condition? How is that better than what is being proposed?

Gee Miles, you're right here it is right here.

(a) In General- The Commissioner shall specify the benefits to be made available under Exchange-participating health benefits plans during each plan year, consistent with subtitle C of title I and this section.

So basically, when my employer drops my health insurance I have a choice of providers in an insurance pool - assuming there is a CHOICE. We have insurance companies that HAVE to make money versus a public option that supplements any money it needs to run from the taxpayer. Let's see how well a 'pool' runs - seems they have it in Mass -
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124726287099225209.html

Oh, and it seems the Canadian health care is taking a hit too.

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/Opinion/Editorials/2009/08/17/10481781-sun.html

The government is NOT the solution, the government is part of the problem (with states mandating too much in policies that are allowed to be sold in their own states).

Bill, you're wrong -- "The whole thing's coming apart and everybody will feel it sooner or later."

There is not a "later" alternative.

Oh, and it seems the Canadian health care is taking a hit too.

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/Opinion/Editorials/2009/08/17/10481781-sun.html

That paper is a right-wing paper and there are no citations for the premises it makes.

What do you say to the people w/o insurance?

Tough?

What do you say to the people w/o insurance?

You tell them at least you can't be denied health care.
From county health services to emergencies never denied Americans care for the sick.

The idea that they should all be given free insurance is absurd.
But hey so is amnesty and cap and trade.

Bill:

I agree completely on the loss of the middle class. It worries me too. But I don't know what we can do about it. Globalization has enabled countries to underbid us for the same manufacturing jobs that used to be ours. And service industry jobs just don't cut it. I believe my children will be the first generation in quite a while to do worse than their parents. Not a good feeling.

Okay Miles - here is another link, Canada is having problems.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jbjzPEY0Y3bvRD335rGu_Z3KXoQw

Health care in crisis? People dying left and right for lack of care? Let's put this in perspective.

Life expectancies in the US have risen 50 percent since my father was born. That's an extra 25 years folks. There is so much hyperbole behind these efforts to drive a monolithic, poorly understood program down people's throats, it's no wonder the death squad metaphor resonates.

The reason why health care costs have become such a large part of the economy is primarily due people wanting it -- it's demand driven.

As someone who has participated in the FEHBP for 31 years, let me tell you what Federal Government control gives you -- homogenous, one-size fits all programs that take away all personal responsibility in one's own health care decisions. With each passing year, the variations in options decline and costs rapidly rise -- its a shared market, not a competive market. Innovation or creativity, which are the elixir of competition, are non-existent. When the costs get too great, the government does some incredibly visionary and creative things like reduce insurance company reserve ratios.

Massive government intervention never increases competition, improves quality, and reduces costs and spurs creativity.

I think it instructive that there is no public option in the FEHBP and there hasn't been a hue and cry in support of one. The Federal bureaucrats don't trust it for themselves.

Here's a few more facts about our current system.

If you are not part of a large plan where the insurer "negotiates" fees with providers, your charges will be significantly higher than those in said plans.

Even though if you pay hard cash, the billing, etc. costs associated with your care are less. Screw the free market.

Essentially, the providers are giving favored status to the big insurers. There is more than one price.

Secondly, there have not been many adjustments to the medicare pay rates that determine what most insurers get to charge. I have friend who is a doc in Sonoma County, CA. In the 60s that was a rural area and the Medicare payments still reflect that though real estate, etc. prices have gone sky high as is has become a bedroom community to SF.

And a public plan may not be a great deal for docs. MediCal takes 6 plus months to pay its claims to docs.

What we need to look at is cutting unnecessary costs and middleman (insurers) and looking at a LEAN model of health care provision.

Thanks for the link, APO. Here are my favorite quotes from the article about Canadian doctors looking to change their health system:

The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet. . . . He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.

Note that he didn't take a fact-finding trip to the US, because no one wants to emulate our current system. Every country he visited has "socialized" medicine.

His thoughts on the issue are already clear. Ouellet has been saying since his return that "a health-care revolution has passed us by," that it's possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and "that competition should be welcomed, not feared."

Hmmm, no wait lists, universal coverage, with competition. Sounds a lot like what Obama's trying to do.

Doig, who has had a full-time family practice in Saskatoon for 30 years, acknowledges that when physicians have talked about changing the health-care system in the past, they've been accused of wanting an American-style structure. She insists that's not the case.

Public opinion surveys have shown that while Canadians have some concerns with their health care system, they are much happier than Americans are with theirs. And in terms of objective data like life expectancy, infant mortality, heart disease, diabetes, etc., Canadians are healthier than Americans.

"Okay Miles - here is another link, Canada is having problems.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jbjzPEY0Y3bvRD335rGu"

From the article:

Ouellet has been saying since his return that "a health-care revolution has passed us by," that it's possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and "that competition should be welcomed, not feared."

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

Does not sound like he is arguing against universal coverage.

No system is perfect but we can do better than this one.
It isn't just the uninsured but people who are one job loss away from being uninsured, people who wind up with huge bankruptcy-inducing bills even when they have coverage,Drs who have bean-counters getting in the way of their jobs.

Against public option who are you?

Jack can you see if this guy (if you want to, of course)is posting from out-of-state or an IP address registered to an insurance corp or one of the right-wing astroturf groups?

PS I live in Aloha and work at a private business. I have coverage.