1) Private insurance companies pay thousands of people purely to deny coverage to paying insurance customers
2) Insurance companies will not cover everything your doctor decides he needs to treat you
3) People die every year because a private insurance company denied care, or delayed care.

If you want to have a honest conversation about government vs private insurance (because that’s actually what we are talking about, nobody has proposed “socialized medicine” ala NHS) you should first understand that the private insurance companies are killing people every day.

17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company’s analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn’t have saved her life.

A study by the American Medical Association found the biggest insurance companies in the country denied between 2 and 5 percent of claims put in by doctors last year

In October 2008, Michael Napientak, a doorman from Clarendon Hills, Ill., went to the hospital for surgery to relieve agonizing back pain. His wife’s employer’s insurance provider, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthCare, had issued a pre-authorization for the operation. The operation went well. But in April, the insurer started sending notices that it wouldn’t pay for the surgery, after all; the family, not the insurance provider, would be on the hook for the $148,000 the hospital charged for the procedure.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/08/11/denial_of_care/

If people would be honest on both sides of this conversation maybe something useful could get done, but unfortunately one side is stuck on “GOVERNMENT GOOD” and the other is on “GOVERNMENT BAD” and the winner will be whoever can yell the loudest, and when all is said and done the American public is probably going to be worse off.

Seems to be I can back up the stuff I comment at least. You can SAY you don’t have problems but it means nothing unless you can back it up. I’m sorry, I know how hard it must be for you liberals to have facts shown in your face when you’ve believed what you’re told all these years. I’m sure there are lots of people in Canada that still swear it’s a good system while people who have no current family doctor have to wait up to 3 years in some provinces to get one.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6127514/Sentenced-to-death-on-the-NHS.html

This is the type of problems you get with government run health care.