The present health care delivery system has many imperfections. But, as confirmed repeatedly by numerous opinion polls, most Americans who have private health insurance are satisfied with their plans. The reason I often enclose the word “reform” in quotation marks is that Obama wants to explode the existing system in favor of a single payer scheme. I know that’s not what he says he wants to do, but he has on one more than one occasion in the past stated that this is his preference (Barney Frank and other liberals in Congress are similarly predisposed).

The insurance industry has agreed to end the practice of denying coverage for pre-existing conditions as well as insuring portability. So, why destroy the existing system that most people are satisfied with (even if there is considerable room for improvement) for a public option that would put the private insurance industry out of business?

And your comment that Americans with employer-provided care don’t see a need for reform might need a little tweaking. Any person who changes jobs can get dinged for pre-existing conditions, new requirements, costs, changes in coverage, etc. Heck, I’ve changed jobs and moved to a new employer who offered the exact same plan as the previous employer, and the big blue shield still considered me a “new” applicant whose ailments, previously covered a week before, were now considered pre-existing conditions.

In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who seems to think their health insurance is “just fine.”

I think your blog has muddled several different issues (economic stimulus &c) but buried in it you have hit a key point..”..Obama has failed to realize that most Americans with existing private insurance plans see no compelling need to explode the existing system…”. I am not sure this exactly true in a strict numeric sense but it is true in a political sense. I think that the majority of people who are more or less satisfied with with their health care are against Obamacare and they exert much more influence than the much larger number of people who either do not have any health coverage at all or are dissatisfied with the system. The people who need health care reform are under-represented in the voting population and have not much of a voice in Washington. In contrast, those more or less happy with the current system for themselves are over-represented in the election and have greater ability to express their views in Washington.

“Yet, to govern is to choose, and to date, as evidenced by his willingness to outsource the crafting of the stimulus and cap and trade bills to his party’s congressional left wing, Obama has been missing in action in terms of exerting some control or establishing some boundaries over the sausage making process.”

That’s just bullshit. If anything, Obama has outsourced legislative crafting to the most conservative members of his party in a futile effort to achieve bipartisanship.

“Created and succored by an adoring, compliant media, the myth of Obama as an above-the-fray transcendent figure bringing recalcitrant parties together was reaped to fruition on the campaign trail, but this iconography has served him ill as President.”

A media that put Dick Cheney’s daughter on 24/7 for several weeks (to choose one example) is hardly adoring or compliant. And, after being told for eight years that Republicans outnumbered Democrats 3:1 on the Sunday talk shows because they were the part in power, we find that Republicans still otnumber Democrats on the Sunday talk shows even thought they are not the party in power.

As for having “health care delivered by the same folks who run Amtrak, the Post Office,” a less dishonest writer would have added “Medicare.” But that would destroy your argument wouldn’t it? So just screw the truth, right?