Sort of a ranty post here, hence the angry gun-toting photo.

My man -- and soon to be home-owner (!!!) -- Franko had an interesting comment on his blog in response to Sicko:

I've had no illusions about how fucked up HMO's are and always just assume that I'll never get any coverage for anything. I have never, ever been totally honest with any doctor I have ever had for fear of having my honesty come back to haunt me. No doctor of mine has or will ever know that I used to smoke cigarettes, how much I drink, past drug use etc. I feel that I am always trying to game a system that would like nothing more than to game me.

This is something I'd never actually considered. Frank's the son of a Doctor so he's been on the inside his whole life. I suppose I've been more of a naive trusting optimist, and having never had any other regular doctor than Dr. Halpern, who was my pediatrician and saw me once or twice as an adult, I've always been totally honest with health care people. It's never occurred to me to do otherwise, because they're supposed to be evaluating my health, and I assume they need all the data. I also assume at some level that what I share with them is private.

This, of course, is not really how it works. The fact that we have a system which employs the profit-motive to drive denial-of-care of course does mean that people lie to their docs. This is just another example of how deeply-grooved the wrong in our system of Health Care is. It's paradigmatically perverted. Spiritually fucked.

I disagree with most of my friends. I think the Health Care plan John Edwards proposed yesterday is a massive dud, and I'm very disappointed.

Here's Candidate Edwards looking and sounding pretty good on the issue:

But here's a summary of his plan, which also remarkably light on specifics and isn't available as HTML (wtf?):

• Require businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance.
• Make insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs.
• Create regional Health Markets purchasing pools to ensure that every American has a way to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance.
• Once these steps have been taken, require all American residents to get insurance.

Emphasis all mine, but notice the difference? Candidate Edwards says the word "insurance" exactly once: to attack a sick and parasitic industry which combines the worst aspects of Socialist Bureaucracy and Capitalist Profiteering, and is rightly loathed by virtually all Americans.

His plan, on the other hand, is all about making insurance affordable and creating new markets and choices for insurance. Oh, and also tax credits for insurance too.

This is a huge mistake, for a couple reasons.