A simple observation on healthcare reform; the fundamental axiom in medicine is "first, do no harm."  What that translates into is an unwillingness by doctors to try dangerous or experimental treatments or drugs because of potential harm to the patient.

Now, this is the standard by which medicine is practiced, yet we are going to throw that standard away in the manner in which medicine is purchased. Obamacare is an enormous experiment in the financing of medicine, one that has been tried by other nations with dubious results and higher mortality rates. When someone from a nation with nationalized healthcare develops cancer, say, or heart disease they try to come to the United States for treatment, because theirs is rationed and they will have to wait much longer to receive inferior care.

Obama and his friends want to impose that same system of America, and nobody has the slightest notion that it will work, but Obama says the status quo is unacceptable and we must opt for an experimental procedure, one with a poor success rate.

Would he be willing to trust Michelle, or his daughters, to an experimental procedure with a poor success rate if they were ill?  Would he want his daughter to have experimental brain surgery to install a governor to control Parkinson's tremors without first trying Dopamine?  Somehow I doubt it, yet he is quite comfortable to perform experimental financial surgery to install a governor in America's health insurance industry without first trying a safer approach - like tort reform to reduce medical liability costs.

People die from government regulation of insurance. According to the Wall Street Journal;

"A 1988 study in the Journal of New England Medicine found that the states with the most stringent rate-setting had mortality rates 6% to 10% higher than those that didn't."