When you have a giant pool of govt workers, you can negotiate great deals (like congress’ and my health care plan). That’s why health care should be nationalized – the deals you get with collectivization are just too great. All industrialized countries do it. We’re just so capitalistic that we’re getting screwed.

I’ve always said, “companies are great at making widgets, not so great at fulfilling needs.” Let them make widgets freely and with minimal regulation (mostly about safety) and leave the needs to the govt. Each has its place. When we nationalize widgets, we head down the road to bread lines but when we privatize needs like health care and water/power we head down the road to great wealth and devastating poverty.

My credit union is not for profit, if they make a profit it comes back to me and other depositors. Fees for checking? Never heard of it in over 20 years. I work civil myself now and with all the benefits they even pay for my bus fare (that’s a savings of $90/month – no chump change really)

And that ole’ chestnut about making less money in exchange for security with a govt job – it’s a myth. I been in the private sector for a few months here and there and it was a cutthroat nightmare of BS AND it didn’t pay more. Question the messenger on this stuff. Who’s telling us that the gov pays less? Corporate talking point if you ask me.

Two encounters with illness have cost David of My Two Dollars and his wife nearly $10,000 out-of-pocket so far this year, and that’s not including the $320 a month they were paying for health insurance premiums. Health care is a huge personal-finance …

Wow…that is quite an impressive package! Know however, that not all public school systems are created equally.

My wife has been a public school teacher in TX for a number of years and we have actually just completed a move where she has begun teaching in KS. Neither of the benefits packages in these states (or, at least, in these particular school systems) is anywhere near as good as you describe.

While the cost to cover just her is/was next to nothing in both cases, and the coverage is decent (though not nearly as good as you describe), the cost to cover the entire family (+spouse, +kids whether 1 or 100) bumped it up to about $800/month. In either case, we appear to still be subjected to the Robin Hood effect of property tax revenues (schools’ primary revenue source) being redirected from major metropolitan areas to more rural areas that just don’t have the tax base. (On the flip side, our children will actually reap the benefit as they will be attending a different school system than the one my wife now teaches in.)

I expect we’ll see the same arrangement in KS as we did in TX: let the school pay for her and my job cover the rest of us.

While I agree that I’d love to see a more universal application of insurance coverage, I don’t know that Medicare, or the government in general is the answer. It’s my current opinion that it’s the very relationship between Medicare and Insurance companies, and all the rules and regulations surrounding it, that are a primary cause of skyrocketing health costs to begin with. Not to mention that I have very little, if any, faith in the government’s ability to “save” me money. Social Security anyone?

Congrats again on your move. Hope all is going well!