I hope you’re right about the upcoming generation. They seem kind of “square.” What we need at this juncture in history is action driven by anger and made potent by creativity. We need a full-blown ’60s-type movement. We need to rise up and challenge the Man. Working within the system won’t work (at least in and of itself) because the system is rigged against us.

1) You are not a Medical Physician (there are a plethora of MD’s who specialize in these areas and are also Psychiatrists);

*AND*

2) You are not a Psychological and/or Psychiatric Professional;

*AND *

3) You are not a sufferer/victim of either mental illness and/or substance abuse issues. The former ALMOST ALWAYS precedes the latter. And then the former is simply further exacerbated by the latter. It is a brutally wicked and ugly vicious cycle, all while tremendously logical and predictable, and carried out by people in a great deal of pain who are simply just trying to cope and survive in their lost, empty, and fear riddled worlds. Most are not drooling green monsters with devils horns. Ever walked in their shoes? I think not. Perhaps finding a different sharing/blogging venue would be advantageous for all involved. You could find a topic/format in which your comments might even be enlightening vs. offensively intolerant. Furthermore, I would encourage you to inform and educate yourself before casting and projecting your prejudicial judgements. Also, digging deep within yourself to find some HEART, sympathy and compassion might just be a grand idea as well. Many of these “losers” who don’t deserve some of the help they need in your small minded opinion were innocent victims of childhood trauma including (but certainly not limited to) rape, beatings, emotional and/or physical abandonment, verbal/mental batterings, incest, extreme neglect, ETC. ETC. ETC. Criticizing those in immensely unfortunate situations and desperately weakened states is not nice. To say the least. To that end, please pull the plug on your closed mind – Not the benefits that these sad, scared, lonely, confused and lost souls need and deserve in order to merely just sustain their tortured existences as well as continue with treatment to heal if they are engaged and not already too far gone. Very few make it out of this. The stats are downright staggering. You’re lucky that you simply just had the wherewithal to write the BS you so ineloquently unleashed.

I’d wager that it’s no cheaper for a small business to buy health insurance for its employees in San Francisco than it is in any other part of the country. The big costs in health care aren’t geographic in origin – they have to do with the massively inefficient way we administer our private health care system. San Francisco seems to have realized savings by cutting out the middlemen to reduce overhead, and by ensuring everyone gets access to preventative care, which reduces expensive trips to the emergency room.

But it sounds like you don’t think those ideas will really work. So…given that America has the most expensive health care in the world among comparable nations – a system that still leaves millions of families without even basic health coverage – how do you propose we control those costs and ensure everyone who needs preventative or emergency care can get it?

~Aaron Keating, EOI

The median household income is high, at over $65,000 and that for families even higher at over $81,000. Earlier figures for Seattle are $46,000 and $40,000.

The high cost of living there has driven out middle-class families, making the proportion of children, 14.5 percent, the lowest in the country. Children need a disproportionate amount of care for birthing and growing up, so getting rid of them saves money both for medical care and for education.

I couldn’t find the figures, but I suspect few elderly and retired people who aren’t wealthy can afford to live there either, eliminating another major health care cost.

Tourism, one of the city’s major industries, attracts mostly young adults as workers, people who have very low health care costs. Again that’s atypical. The city does have a serious problem with homelessness and poverty, but that is a group that simply suffers without good medical care. It’s easy to suspect that the city’s rich population cares little about that.

In short, it’s silly to even ask if this program could be replicated elsewhere or scaled up for the rest of the country.

In addition, no program administered by Obama is likely to be successful. In his one experience as an executive, he headed a program that spent $165 million on Chicago schools that produced no measurable effect on the schools. Imagine that! I could do far better myself and I would never have the hubris to undertake major reforms in education and health care.

Washington is kicking 40,000 people off Basic Health because our politicians are incompetent. In flush times they built stadiums we are now paying for and neglected basic infrastructure. Even with the economy down, they still want to rebuild the Viaduct with a costly tunnel whose cost overruns are likely to rival that of the “Big Dig” in Boston. That shows all too clearly that politicians who run our state can’t even get simple stuff like roads and bridges right. It’s insane to put something as complex and critical as medical care in their hands and equally insane to take seriously any “expert” who’d consider that as an option.

–Mike Perry, Seattle