Please please please we need a real 100% genuine public option on health care

I dunno about you, but I am already pissed that people with job-based health insurance apparently won't have the option of switching to the public plan the instant the new health care bill--if there ever *is* a new health care bill--goes into effect. Because look, folks, we have health insurance through Mr. B.'s employer. Ostensibly it is good health insurance. In fact, we have always had health insurance through Mr. B.'s employers except for three years when we lived in Canadia.

And I am here to tell you that, although I bitched a *lot* about how fucking difficult it was to get mental health care in Canada at the time, specifically talk therapy, most of that frustration cleared up once I was finally rockin' the Effexor. Which I *was* able to get. Because once I sucked it up and just went to the MD, who gave me pills instead of talking to me (which was what I thought I wanted), and we cycled through different kinds of pills and found one that worked for me, I *started feeling better*.

Score one for research-based, rather than consumer-driven, medicine.

And that was my one big frustration with the Ontario system. Which by the way, knows that mental health coverage is an ongoing problem and therefore elected officials are actually addressing the issue.

Which is more than you can say about the way it works here when your private health insurance constantly changes, forcing you to switch providers, so that your doctors have no consistent overall sense of your health situation and therefore you end up with inadequate care. Or, as I'm dealing with these days, you refuse to change providers when your employer switches plans on you every damn year, so that you end up paying for most of your visits *anyway*, so what's the point of having health insurance? Except that obviously not having it would be insane because what if someone needed to go to the ER?

Then there's the fun of having the private insurer refuse to cover procedures that their booklet says they damnwell *do* cover, and you have thirty days to jump through their hoop appeal in writing. Every. Fucking. Time. You get a filling (I shit you not).

Or the joy of the mail-order prescription service. Which I loathe. Because not only do they keep jacking their prices ($60/prescription these days--in Canadia, prescriptions were free, people), they also provide contradictory information about whether you need to mail in a hand-written prescription yourself, once your refills run out (which is what the website says) or whether you need to have the doctor fax in the new scrip from his office (which is what the paper they mail you with your last refill says). In which case, you need to call the doctor *again* and have him *rewrite* the scrip and fax it in, over and above the appointment you set up to have the new scrip written two weeks ago--so let's see, we're wasting how much of the doctor's time (and my money) to "save" money for the insurance company?

Seriously, people. Even if you don't give a shit about whether or not people who don't have jobs can get any kind of medical care short of going to the ER with a sinus infection and making the lines hours and hours longer and costing the system thousands; even if you think it's hunky-dory for the government to slash health care for poor people if there's a financial crisis, instead of treating health care as an entitlement--meaning that, even if/when we run into budget problems, figuring out how to pay for it is going to be a huge fucking national priority rather than the concern of "special interests"; even if you believe that The Free Market Solves Everything; and even if you think for some reason that it's better to have the employees of profit-minded organizations deciding when you can see a doctor rather than elected officials who are at least theoretically answerable to you; even if you yourself have "good" private insurance and lack the imagination to believe that it's possible you might ever lack it. . . .

Even if all these things are true, I'm here to tell you: public insurance sure as shit isn't any *worse* than what we've got now.