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Worked 'till 3:15am, but in a night I've gotten maybe-almost-done (depending on what the co-workers I've sent it to for review say) a project I was worried was going to take me... well, I had no idea how long it was going to take, which is why making some real progress on it takes a load off my mind. Woo! My TODO is still scary-long, but this helps.

Now, if my brain will just let me sleep in... *crosses fingers*

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ryca linked me to a couple of fascinating posts made by liz_marcs, who apparently has a pretty broad set of flisters. She started one post for Americans to post their health-care stories, and another for non-Americans under government healthcare systems, good bad and ugly. Reading through the results is very interesting. It's all anecdotal, of course, but at this point that's well-worth cutting out the middleman in assessing what the different experiences are like
to me.

American Stories

Non-American Stories

Then again, there are still a lot of questions that are bothering me about the current situation:

The proposed plan in the US is not a single-payer system like those described above (though some seem to fear/assert that it will inevitably lead to one). Instead, my understanding is that it creates a government insurance offering that "competes" with the for-proffit companies. But how can it do that without becoming a dumping ground for the least insurable people out there? And if that happens, how can it compete?

I'm also hearing that the proposed plan mandates insurance with penalties against those who don't subscribe. During the primaries, Obama's position against this was one of the main things that I liked about him over Clinton.

Urgh. Anyway, still suffering from head-explody, but helpful information nonetheless. Makes me all the more pissed about the crazy scare-tactics that are being used about people dying in line waiting for care in other countries (the citizens of which, when polled, still seem to like their death camps as much or more than we like our system for some reason, those wacky Canadians), etc... and terrified that so many people seem to be buying them completely. =:(

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PolitiFact, which I generally trust for even-handed fact-checking of political claims just released a summary of the proposed health care changes and the controversies surrounding them, along with a collection of their "greatest hits" of healthcare-related fact checking. I read the summary and it seemed to me, as expected, very concise, straightforward and fair. Well worth looking at.

I've been following PolitiFact (which apparently recently won a Pulitzer-- good for them!) and factcheck.org, which is un-related but has a similar mission, since the primaries and have become a big fan of both.