I assume that Governor Pawlenty will not be enrolling in Medicare at age 65, given his distaste for government run health care.

I assume that he has refused the "government-run health care" that he has access to as a state employee.

Another transparent, pointless comment by the governor for an audience outside of the state. Minnesota is not the deep south, and he knows he has no chance of persuading the legislature to go along with anything that dumb, but he wants to get credit from Fox News and the Republican base.

I wonder what he'll do about his health care after his term is over?

Harry Truman wanted to provide universal health care in 1947. The American Medical Association, the doctors, hired a PR firm, who invented the term socialized medicine. Nobody knew what it meant, but I think the idea was if you wanted to provide health care to your sick neighbor, you were a commie, and you know, during the Cold War, that was a powerful argument.

The amazing thing is it's still a powerful argument. I don't know that anybody can define socialized medicine, but nobody seems to like it, except, when Americans get government-run medicine, they really like it. The VA, the Native American Health Service and Medicare are the three most popular health care systems in America, all run by government.

I would like to push the Legislature to pass a bill that would force this small-minded, self-serving politician to opt himself out of the public option. It seems his objection is based on personal dislike, not on any cogent arguments about why the rest of us should be forced to forgo having the choice.

Richard Schulze, where did you get this misinformation?

"The VA, the Native American Health Service and Medicare are the three most popular health care systems in America, all run by government."

Are you trying to mislead readers or are you just ignorant?

There is no "Native American Health Services". The program is (insultingly) called "Indian Health Services" and it is horribly underfunded, poorly run, and leads to the deaths of countless Native Americans who have nowhere else to turn. Read this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574376981533298534.html

The VA is underfunded and inept. Read this article: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/24/va-medical-shambles-veterans-groups-say/

Medicare is rushing toward bankruptcy and is nothing more than a pyramid scheme to rob from the young and buy votes from the old. Read this article: http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/14901/Medicare_Will_Be_Bankrupt_by_2019.html

"The VA, the Native American Health Service and Medicare are the three most popular health care systems in America, all run by government."

Are you serious ? Have you heard any of the issues that the Native American Health Service has had ? Instances where people on the reservation are told "don't get sick after July" because the funding for their local clinic will have been depleted by then? Instances where Vets have to jump through a bureaucratic maze to get their most basic needs taken care of ? Instances where doctors have decided to opt out of the Medicare system because the system will not pay anything near a reasonable cost for a procedure and when they do pay , payments are long delayed?

That you can even try and hold up those three paragons of government mismanagement as exemplars of how healthcare should be run shows you innate lack seriousness on the issue

Suspect Pawlenty's position is based on the fiscal instability of the current government-run health plan, Medicare. Right now, the unfunded liability of Medicare is $36 trillion, and that is projected to grow to $48 trillion by 2013.

People that smugly ask if free market proponents will be accepting Medicare somehow have forgotten that no one asked if we wanted to have money deducted from our payroll checks to pay for it.

If Obama is willing to refund the money that was forcibly taken from me, I'd gladly take my health care business elsewhere.

The same holds true for the hundreds of thousands of dollars the government is "saving" for my retirement...'course that money is long gone and I'll never see it.

@#6 Daryl, I thought that the term "Native American" would be less objectionable to most folks, so I took the liberty to insert the less "insulting" term. If for some reason you do not find the term Native American synonymous with the word Indian it is my fault. I thought that it was a rather obvious liberty. Perhaps that "issue" was not in fact your ultimate "point" which was in fact, more of a financial nature.

@#7 Bob
[These are the three most "popular" forms of government run healthcare]. That comment is a simple fact.

I don't see any reference in any of my comment regarding the particulars of these popular government run programs. Your point as with Daryl's is again, one of a financial nature.

The fact remains that these three government run programs are the three most popular programs with regard to government run medicine. I would suggest that your finding fault with this simple fact is one of ideology and really no more sophisticated than that.

Best to all...

Is the glass half full or half empty? Depends on who you ask.

While there has been many good points made on this thread. I'll attempt to go a little bit further in making my case.

Here is an example of what really complicates things for doctors and patients and also makes healthcare much more expensive.

It's just vastly simpler if there's one set of rules and one set of forms and one price or one regional price for the whole country.

You know, you go to the doctor in France and that doctor, by law, is required to post on the wall the price she's going to charge you for the hundred most common procedures that she does. And then the next column says how much insurance is going to pay you back. And the next column says how many days before the insurance pays you. No doctor in America could do that because they don't know what they're getting paid. They get 30 different fees for the same procedure in the same week because of all the different plans.

The result is enormous administrative complexity. The American health insurance industry - you know, it's free enterprise, it's competitive, those guys, as we said, make huge salaries - it's the least efficient payment system in the world. They spend 18 to 20 percent of every premium dollar on administration costs.

The French insurance industry spends four percent on administration. Germany, five percent, Japan about five percent. We are just pouring tons of money into stuff that doesn't buy anybody healthcare largely because we have this hugely complicated overlapping set of systems and that's one of the reasons all the other countries went to a single system. (not to be confused with single payer.)

Another reason is if everybody's in the same system - and it doesn't have to be a single-payer. Japan has 3,000 payers but it's a coordinated system with one set of rules. If everybody's in it then they have an economic incentive to pay for preventive care.

In those countries, the insurance companies have one goal in life, and that is to keep people healthy. That's what they're for, and the reason for that is those countries have all decided that there's a basic conflict between making a profit for investors and covering people's health.

Richard Schulze has an excellent point about the administrative complexities that drive up costs. I noticed another aspect when my wife had same day surgery several years ago.

The nurse in the recovery room performed a number of nurse type tasks: administering medicine, instructing us on care at home, changing bandages, and such like. She spent about 2/3 again as much time entering the detail of this into the computer for billing purposes.

I've done ERP systems for 25 years or so. I never saw a sucessful company that tracked goods or labor to that level. It would be like your mechanic recording and charging for every bolt and screw taken off and replaced as part of the repair.

Sure enough, each detail item was on the bill at a wildly inflated price. Why? To cover the uninsured. (And those "insured" whose companies start cheating after the patient hits their out of pocket max, which is to say nearly everyone who gets seriously sick)

This system is just plain broken. We have to fix it. The conservative's solution? Claiming Obama was born in Kenya, so far.

If Tim Pawlenty wants the Democrats in the Legislature to opt out of their own party's health plan, all he has to do is draw on the tremendous store of good will he has built up because of the way he has cooperated and shown himself willing to listen to opposing viewpoints.

The time he has spent this year in meeting with the other side of the aisle and working to find agreement on the budget should be the deciding factor.

I would like to congratulate the gentleman who posted that the government had taken hundreds of thousand of dollars for his retirement. I'm assuming this was a reference to Social Security.

In order to have done this (at the 2009 maximum of 6621.60), the gentleman would have had to hit or exceed the maximum taxable earning for at least the last 30 years to have had 200K withheld. (At employee withholding rates - as a self-employed person, it would be at least 20 years)

Since the maximum taxable amounts and rates have increased over the years, we are looking at a long and quite successful career here. Again, congratulations.

One more thought for the gentleman who would like to opt out of Medicare: were your parents covered under Medicare or are they now?

Square up for any benefits they got, and/or take them with you, and you are free to leave as far as I am concerned. But since I've been paying for them, with no more choice than you have, you really ought to settle up first.

Wally, not only is my father still paying into MediCare, the business he built pays for a very nice health benefit package for his employees, himself and my mother.

Your sentiment expresses a sense of anger that you have to "pay for" the benefits of "them". I understand your frustration, but one of the consequences of getting the government involved in a thing, is the sacrifice of our freedom to choose.

1) Underfunding does not mean that government systems are bad. Underfunding means that a system has not been provided with the means it needs to adequately get the job done.

2) No one has to take Medicare, or Social Security, or VA coverage. If you don't like it, don't use it. Get your own coverage if you can do better. I think that is the point of public option.

Tim Pawlenty's political life is over. His reputation will forever precede him. Fox news is a good medium for airing his views. What a loser!! Like he could persuade Amy Klobuchar, Al Franken, and Tim Walz. Ha!

Rep.Weiner from New York points out that the public option is not what Jacob Hacker envisioned, which was a Medicare-like public plan that ANYONE could join. Thom Hartmann, seconded by Howard Dean, suggests opening Medicare to anyone under 65 who pays its premiums in order to choose it as the public option.

The oh-so-eager search for "bipartisanship" has given us a public option that will be open only to those who do not have any kind of insurance (one estimate says only 8 million people) and who cannot afford to pay regularly-priced premiums.

Opt out? Yes - but first pass the Kucinich amendment that would allow states to enact their own single-payer plans instead of accepting the industry-pleasing plan that is likely to emerge. We could then have John Marty's Minnesota Health Plan, rejoice in its guarantee of health care for every Minnesotan (while saving money), and its service as a model other states could follow.

Wow ! This public option has got legs. I thiught for sure it had died. I wonder why and how it came back ? Could it have something to do with the people wanting a public option. Gov. Timboliya can push the legislators all he wants continue to throw red herrings at the masses but the people are speaking and it seems to be that the Dems might be beginning to listen. They just better be listening carefully enough.