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I am also a foreigner (with respect to the USA) so, although I have followed the debate, it doesn't touch me personally. I also don't know all the details of the bill, but probably neither do the majority of the Americans. But we can easily see from here that the USA health care system is in some serious problems: (1) Way too many people are uninsured, some because they don't care but many because they just can't pay the insurance premium or because no company wants to insure them. Last night I saw on TV an item about someone who needed a heart operation, was uninsured and they had to sell their house and live in their car. (2) American health care is way too expensive. Their are several causes for this, a.o. the claim culture, the - probably too high - salaries of doctors and, very important, the power of the insurance companies and the health care industry in general. Our own health care is about half the price of that in the USA.
I have seen a chart correlating the cost of health care with the price in different countries, and surprisingly there are several countries with comparable or better health care than the USA with much lower prices. So although the health care in the USA is probably quite good, that isn't the cause of the high price.
I understood that the bill's main objectives are to attack the 2 problems mentioned above: making health care available to all people, and diminishing the cost. Maybe someone with more knowledge about it can try to tell us what the main points of the bill are. I personally believe these would be valid points. Cheaper is always better if quality remains the same, and my pro-life stance says that people shouldn't die because they can't afford health care. This applies especially to children who usually don't have a say in these affairs.
I am reasonably content with the system we have here in Holland. We don't have a national health service like in the UK, but the government is involved in the health care. Mainly because most hospitals get some kind of government budget. But the insurance companies are commercial. There is a basic health insurance package, and the government decides what it covers. Everybody is obliged to get this package and the insurance company is obligated to accept everybody. The insurance company sets the price for the package, but for reasons of competition they don't have much leeway of course. Besides this they can offer additional packages and they can refuse clients for these. But the ususal life threatening treatments are included in the basic package. All your bills go to the insurance company (there is a basic yearly amount that you have to pay yourself). Besides the premium that you pay to the insurance company you also pay an income-dependent amount to the government, and this is used also to subsidize the hospitals and probably medical research.
Sometimes waiting times are a bit high (I think this has to do with tight budgets), but these can be overcome. I needed a heart operation a couple of years ago, and the waiting time was several months. It was not a life threatening situation and if it would have been I would have gotten priority treatment. But my insurance company supported having me operated in Germany, where there were no waiting lists and health care is better than here (and not more expensive). Germans are just better organized.
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