I don't want to turn my freedoms over to the government any more than anyone else posting here. But with regard to health insurance, OUR "FREEDOMS" ARE ALREADY GONE! They've been gone for a long time. The insurance companies and the corporations that negotiated the policies that cover their employees have seen to that a long time ago. For those old enough to be required to have Medicare as their principal health insurance, they too have lost any freedom that might have been associated with healthcare insurance. Your doctors have very little to say about how you should be treated. They will provide service only when the insurance companies or Medicare will pay them for providing it. Some clerk or bureaucrat is on the phone telling your doctor or hospital what treatments are "approved", when you should be sent home, and will be paid for. Is that a "lost freedom"?

All this has happened over the last 10-15 years and can't be laid at the doorstep of any particular President or Congress. We've had Presidents as well as Congresses from both political parties that have overseen this happening. Oh, I suppose you can blame the politicians for reducing the payments for services covered by Medicare so significantly that over 40% of the doctors in the U.S. refuse to offer service to patients who have Medicare as their principal form of insurance. Many big hospitals are following suit. Many of the best hospitals in New York city refuse Medicare insurance, as an example. Aren't those "lost freedoms"?

All this has happened in what we so lovingly refer to as the "free market system". From what I can see, there's not many more freedoms to be lost if a portion of the new healthcare bill has a government-provided insurance option. How could it be any worse than Medicare is now? And with a lousy economy and large companies really watching their pennies and dimes, wait until we begin to read of the dramatically reduced benefits and increased deductibles and co-pays with employer-provided insurance. Or even the withdrawl of health insurance as a company-funded benefit at all. It won't surprise me if lots of companies simply shift the total cost of health insurance to their employees, limiting their involvement to only negotiating the group policy. Heck, the big bank that I retired from did that twenty years ago!

These freedoms are already gone folks. And it happened while were looking and enjoying our increased wealth as the result of skyrocketing home values...even though in our hearts we knew it didn't make sense. Now that our home values and the economy are in the tank, we're suddenly beginning to realize the other "freedoms" that have been taken from us already. And the government had very little to do with it.
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P.S. By the way, Bucco, who better to pay for the cost of a new healthcare plan than the wealthiest Americans who have been treated so royally by politicians, particularly from 2000 to 2008? Even if income taxes on the richest are increased by the amounts being discussed in the press, the top 3% or so will still be way ahead of where they were before the "Bush tax cuts". They'd still be enjoying marginal tax rates that are near the lowest level they've ever been since the enactment of the income tax in the U.S. almost 100 years ago.