Health Care Comparison Shopping

I don't mean to drumbeat about health care reform (single payer!  Single payer!) (much), but Avedon Carol's essay at The Sideshow is worth reading.  (And maybe sending a copy with attribution to your Senator if you have one, because apparently they are still enthralled by insurance companies.)

On the money:

And why shouldn't Americans have that kind of care, too? After all, you're already paying for it - in taxes. Every time you pay taxes, regardless of your own healthcare plan, you also pay for someone else's healthcare - Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, NIH, SCHIP, whatever - you're paying for government health services and research (which, by the way, is also a subsidy to the commercial medical industry that makes use of the research and development at bargain rates) - only you're paying for a lot of it more expensively than you need to because so much waste is involved in servicing the myriad different commercial providers who have their fingers in the pie. And then when you get your own commercial healthcare, you pay extra for the very fact that someone has to ask you to name your insurance company and give them your insurance details. No one ever asks me my insurance details here - they already know them, because they're the same for everyone.