The main point was that the public option fosters competition although much watered down in the latest version.

Most people would agree the government is generally more bureaucratic and ineffective than private enterprise but some would still argue that government is better suited to certain types of enterprise than private concerns.

The problem is there is rarely a level playing field. Our balance of trade is supposedly bad BECAUSE OF supposed government interference not from lack of it. The Chinese gov. intervenes to keep the yen devalued favoring trade.

There are few real examples. The post office is an example of private enterprise doing it better than gov.

Mostly, there is a lack of a level playing field, and gov. operates (as a monopoly) in areas where it has an advantage, and private enterprise operates in other areas where it can easily excel, but the two rarely if ever compete head-to-head against each other.

Hey Biscuit—-name one enterprise where the US govt. is competitive with whomever?

Good job pointing those things out, Biscuit. I agree. But hey, what are you?—Crazy?! Two-thousand an eye for Lasix is a f*cking bargain! Man, it was 18-thousand 10 yrs ago…I’m goin’ out tomorrow & get 1100 nanometers hot light shot into my orbits! Hell yeah, I’m gonna take advantage of this sale.

Thanks to competition, shopping for un-needed medical procedures is a whole lot more affordable!

Christmas is coming…have you purchased for your loved ones $100 Root Canal Gift Certificates from Smilin’ Sal DDS? (If you haven’t, the coupons are in last week’s ValPak).

Tell your doctor YOU WANT LIPITOR! Not the competitor’s cheap imitations, not Roche Laboratory’s snake oil for cholesterol—you want LIPITOR!!! And if your doc won’t give you Lipitor, fire the bastard & go to his competitor down the street.

There’s nothing like competition—To get uncooperative doctors to comply with people’s hysterical buying fetishes & demands.

If Bart is going to cherrypick examples he should at least pick examples that help to prove his point.

Google, Microsoft and Apple do not compete vigorously. They each have near monopolies in their own areas of expertise, be it operating systems, search engines, or phones.

Actually not completely true.  Bing may well give Google a run for the money but partly because Microsoft has unlimited resources to pour into it. There is an irritating unwanted little Bing icon on my browser toolbar right now, not what I call competition. No Google icon.

We have plentiful food because agricultural technology has exploded. We have cheap food because it is plentiful, supply and demand, ample supply. Partly because there is agricultural farm subsidies, something Bart decries in other contexts. There is also competition, but partly from foreign countries. A good deal of our cheap food is imported.

Lasik eye surgery according to Yahoo Answers is about two thousand an eye. How is that cheap ? I don’t get it.

Sure, competition lowers prices to a greater or lesser extent, but the purpose of a public option is to create competition with the HMOs doctors and hospitals who otherwise set prices as they wish.  Why are they worried about going out of business if they aren’t feeling the fear of competition ?

It’s this nutty notion that only private enterprise can produce competition that hurts us. Government is not always competent but sometimes competitive.

The difference is that health care is a life and death matter. One cannot ignore the poor and blacks. Food on the other hand is an option that can be obtained anywhere. However, the US populace thinks that all benefits should be given to all citizens and of course free, through taxes. When a society no longer teaches its core values, then it loses them. We have.

This white male would LOVE some fat laden ribs & tamales right about now.

Radio10 has long noticed that folks on these carefully-planned ‘diets’ (ounce-for-ounce measurements of healthy stuff) get sicker when flu viruses go around. By contrast, people like me—who shamelessly pack-in the fat, salt & whatever else without reservation—DON’T get sick when these weird flus go around.

Food has things in it that keeps the resistance up. No rocket science there!

The real question is…does anyone think they won’t eventually nationalize the production and distribution of food too?

If health care is a “right” why not food as well? Is it fair that some eat steak while others can only afford chicken? How is it white people can afford to eat “healthy” while minorities are forced to exist on fat laden ribs and tomales?

laugh if you like but, this argument is already being made.

And once Obamacare is passed and the costs start to rise thousands of percent beyond cost estimates, do any of you actually think that the gov’t won’t use this as an excuse to take over food production and distribution as a means of keeping health costs down? Can’t have people eating Big Macs and driving up everyones taxes….assuming we’re even allowed to keep any of what we earn by that point.

Laugh again. I remember a certain Professor at Uof R who wrote a guest colum on this very site arguning that everything we have rightfully belongs to the gov’t.

That’s the type of anal seepage that’s running the country right now. I don’t put anything past them.