There's been a lot of tlak about health care benmefits in large corporations last year. GM is having problems because the health care costs of their employees make their cars much more expensive than they should be, and make it tough to compete against Japanese manufacturers. This all started when GM, like a lot of other companies that are facing the same issue, negotiated fantastic compensation for their employees during a time of little or no competition. Now that Japan is a huge seller of cars in the US, thos health care benefits are strangling US companies. It's their own fault for not having the foresight to think that someone else might decide to build cars, also. They coudl renegotiate, but they would look like jerks. So now people are saying we need National Health Care to compete with Japan. That's ridiculous. The same amount of money will get spent, it's just that now our tax dollars will pay for it, not the coporate revenues. Either way it will stifle our ability to compete. What we need to do is not create a national health care system, but refurbish the entire health care industry. The problems stem from insurance more than anything else. A non-health care example to make my point is when my roommate's windshield was broken. A repair guy came out to put a new piece of glass in, and he even stated aloud to my roommate that the bill would be a lot cheaper if he wasn't using insurance. To think doctors and hospitals don't raise their rates when they know insurance will pay for it is just plain naive. If we can somehow stop that practice, suddenly health care becomes much cheaper, maybe even so cheap that we won't need company-paid health benefits. It's not like company health care is a law or anything. It started at some point after WWII as a recruiting incentive for some large companies. It's only in the last 20 or 30 years that people started thinking of it as a right, instead of a priveledge. At any rate, a national health care system is the LAST thing we need. One need only to examine Canada's problems to realize such.