The following comment from Huffington Post, is typical of those who believe government programs cannot work well:

The Postal System, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security all have one thing in common. Their bankrupt.

Yes, lets socialize health care.

Who thought that was a good idea?

This argument may seem reasonable at first blush, but my response was made in the following rebuttal:

If Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid could take in premiums and then refuse to pay the health care bills of its subscribers, then it could profit like private insurance does.

If the postal service were not mandated to provide service that the profitable companies avoid, they might make a profit, too. Fedex and UPS do not deliver to my house 6 days a week. They deliver when it is convenient and profitable for them.

Well, to some extent local governments have known how to do this for years.

My father owned and ran a small drug store in a working class to poor neighborhood for 40 years up till he retired in the 1980’s. Many of his customers were on welfare as it was called back then. He would submit bills to the welfare office that would bounce them back for minor errors. He would fix the bills and resubmit them and wait and wait for payment. He frequently had to take out personal loans to float the store’s inventory until the payments would finally come in.

Now that drugstores are run by big corporations and welfare is partially Federally funded through Medicaid, the burden has been shifted to the recipients who are now denied coverage unless they can hire a lawyer and fight for it.

This tactic of denying coverage was something that seemed to be a brainchild of the Reagan, Bush, Bush administrations.

The lesson learned should be that if we ever do get a public option for health care, don’t ever elect Republicans to national office to control it.  Remember that all the nasty things that you are worried about such as death panels are ideas that come from Republican minds.