Mr Sprugeon has it correct that if all citizens are not covered by insurance for medical care that the US will have a huge and growing permanent poverty class. The current economic crisis is dismantling the safety nets of the working class. A federal system is needed to equalize access and quality of care; otherwise you will have one set of benefits for wealthier states than for poor states. It is time to get financial greed out of health care (huge Insurance/HMO CEO pay packages).

This country has become incredibly backward. To me, it has no future whatsoever if health care isn't provided for the uninsured. By no future, I mean Mexican style poverty. I think this is immanent. The poor cannot be forced into exile in their own country by demoralizing them into a life so circumspect, they cannot eat sugar, and have to live with doctors who won't give penicillin for pneumonia, as happened to me a year or two ago. Unimaginable! I could have died from pneumonia. I visited the doctor, a woman, who didn't want to pollute the river with penicillin at the Oregon Medical Group in Lane County, several times, telling her I was sweating a lot in bed. An old M.D. gave me a series for pneumonia, which cleared it up in two weeks. As long as medicine is in private hands, there will be no spirit of success, no hope of any esprit de corps, or a sense of mission. The doctors are spiritually ennervated to the point of incompetence. Something good has to happen in this country, or all citizens will languish in awful poverty, as is nearly the case now!

If one reads the constitutions of the states, one can see that the responsibility of medical coverage by a government should not be done by the federal but by the state and the state of Oregon has all of the components needed to do this but has been unwilling and unable to due to corporate pressures to properly set this up. In actuality, a state run Insurance company could be run to the point as to help lower and replace state collected taxes and fully fund this state and all it's current programs at full capicity and not at it's current capicity.