I'd say that we definitely need someone to push health care, for the good of individual citizens and businesses burdened by high health care costs, not to mention the poor who go completely without coverage. It is a tragedy that nearly 50 million people completely lack any type of health insurance coverage. That needs to change, and I suspect that if unemployment reaches new highs, with people out of work and out of health insurance, it may force Washington to address the exorbitant cost of health care in this country.

No health care program, whether public or private, no matter how seemingly viable it may seem, can be sustainable without some sort of price controls for drug makers and insurance companies. The medical care industry has become a sort of mafia and blocks all forms of real competition for services. All what we're seeing is tons of industry collusion, a lot of it focused on extorting funds from Medicare and Medicaid. We saw this with the passage of the infamous Medicare Part D under the Bush Administration, a wasteful bill that was a massive giveaway to the drug companies. Medicare in fact forfeited all rights to negotiate drug prices for themselves!!

Of course, no one in Washington will address the price containment issue with health care. And why would they? After all, the health care lobby is one of the strongest and richest in Washington. Going up against these guys might mean the end of your political career Obama's health care plan promises nationalization, but with the same high costs and low quality of service. One positive aspect of his plan is that he wants to digitize all medical data, but overall, the plan is just another massive giveaway. So we may need to wait some time for any real change on this front.