There's no ignoring that we have a symbiotic relationship with microbes that live on our person

Perhaps, the best 'politics vs. substance' summary to date is "Obamacare: The Only Exit Strategy" by Charles Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist, posted Friday, August 28, 2009.

In the NY Times piece,  "Shortage of Doctors an Obstacle to Obama Goals," we learn there are "shortages of primary care providers.... the main source of health care for most Americans."

"Canada is a wonderful place to have a nasty gash on one's forehead stitched, or to break one's nose in a game of pick-up baseball; but have cancer, or need eye surgery, or want an MRI, and the business of medicine in Canada and/or the UK breaks down badly in favour of medical care here in the US.

Robert Reich, the 22^nd Secretary of Labor, cautions us to not panic when we hear that "Social Security will run out of assets in 2037, four years sooner than previously forecast, and Medicare's hospital fund will be exhausted by 2017, two years earlier than predicted a year ago." As a trustee of the Social Security and the Medicare trust funds, 15 yeears ago, when both were "supposedly in trouble", they weren't.  As he observed,  the "timing and magnitude of the trouble depended a great dal on what assumptions the actuary used in his models"— the economy was predicted to grow at 2.6%/yr  for 75 years, but it actually was  growing at a rate of 3%/yr.,  and that would make Social Security "flush for the next seventy-five years."