Thank you

tomcalwriter1; You raised a good point. Do you think we'll ever have a National Holiday honoring those who refused to serve in one of the many senseless wars?

What's there not to get. U.S. policy has been dictated by the military since WW II. They're the biggest entitlement program in our history, BY FAR! Look at how we glorify our veterans every Memorial Day and 4th of July, glorify the killings of millions of innocent people during the wars we fought in other countries, and people are so brainwashed that they buy it. When the historians look back a couple centuries from now, they will see how sick and destructive our nation was.

I heard this woman from the AEI today talking about net neutrality and had to wonder what world she lives in. Her argument that we need to eliminate it to allow for more choice on the internet is the worst sort of bunk. All you have to do is to look at cable TV to see how wrong she is.

If what she said were true I would have choices on my cable TV package to only get the stations that I want. I would prefer to just eliminate all sports channels from my subscription. I NEVER watch them and will never watch them. In spite of this, every package available not only has dozens of sports channels, but I am charged a local sports fee. In other words, allowing cable companies to decide what content I get just allows them to bundle things in ways that are most profitable for them, ignoring the specific needs of many of their subscribers.

The same thing will happen with the internet. Instead of paying for access based on speed, eliminating net neutrality would allow them to charge extra to get to certain sites, meaning that I need to know what sites I am going to visit before I subscribe. It would stifle innovation, because it will become harder for startup companies to make their sites accessible to a large number of people. It will NOT allow choice or flexibility, but will in fact do the opposite.

Despite our troubles, we are still the richest nation on Earth. If the fastest growing segment of new wealth -- created and financed 100% by taxpayers -- is nothing but a savage tribe of wildly wealthy warlords who think a single military boondoggle, in their never-ending quest for more fearsome weapons of death, has as much value as the health and very lives of those who fund their lavish lifestyles, then, certainly, it is time to rise up and demand change, to reset priorities and redirect collective resources so that the sweat of our brow reflects majority will and higher values!

The Masters make the rules for the wisemen and the fools. We don't need any of that stuff. Israel is now making our foriegn policy in the Mid East. The CIA and angry mafia dons plus disgruntled CEOs make the policy in South America. We need a Democratic Party that stands for a sensible foriegn policy, not a war monger policy like Clinton supports. Her idea of a "consensus" foriegn policy shows how far right the corporate Dems are on this set of issues. Their is no difference between Obama and Bush, Clinton and Cheney.

Conservatives and Repugnicons are nothing more than greedy, arrogant, hateful, cold-hearted bastards. I hope there's a special, and very cruel, place in Hell just for them.

How would you know?

Ou812, you are truly depaved to compare Americans' single-payer movement to the evil of Hitler's Gernany. Go away and stay away!

All income, not just payroll, would be taxed fairly in a graduated manner just like we finance everything else. As in every other modern society, the average per individual tax share for healthcare will be less than half what it is now -- premiums, deductibles, co-pays, out-of-pocket, lifetime caps, and all the other hidden costs that for-profit predators inflict upon their captive victims in their single-minded mission to deny as many claims as possible, while throwing as many sick people as possible onto government programs, such as Medicaid and medicare.

Is war meant to be a jobs program for soldiers? Healthcare should not be a welfare program for clerks or profiteers. Progress marches on; blacksmiths, buggy makers, and telegraph operators will just have to adapt and learn new skills, just lIke railroaders did when the carriers got rid of cabooses and halved the crew. I hear the Medicare-for-all, green technology, and infrastructure construction sectors will need lots of well-trained people.

The price of bulk medication and services will be negotiated down, just like it is everywhere else in the business world -- the "free"-market in action, baby! Over-priced providers, hospitals, drug companies, medical equipment manufacturers, et al, will also have to adapt, as will investors on wall street. If someone's only goal in life is to become filthy rich, then they should choose a different profession other than predatory healthcare. As in the rest of the world, most healthcare professionals chose their career as a vocation to help people -- and are still compensated quite nicely.

The rest of your questions are non sequiturs and nonsensical distractions outside the purview of providing single-payer healthcare -- separate issues thrown into your bag of doorknobs:

Undocumented immigrants would not have access to the program because, well, they are undocumented. That's not the responsibility of a national healthcare program for citizens. People with no "papers" -- a tiny percent of our population -- will have to be handled differently through another department. Oh, I don't know ...what would Republicans like to do -- break up families, deport 'em, jail 'em, starve 'em, let 'em die in the ditches? Certainly, extending any mercy is out of the question.

I thought Republicans hated trial lawyers and blamed "frivolous" lawsuits for sky-rocketing costs??? Whatever ...sue away to your heart's content. Nothing changes under single-payer. Hospitals and providers are still in the private sector -- the single-payer movement in America is not advocating that they be employees of the government, like in England (although most British citizens -- providers and patients -- are quite happy with their totally socialized national healthcare system, notwithstanding the endless efforts by their own corporate right-wingers to profitize everything).

Anyway, you refuse to do what you are asking others to do. Instead of dreaming up inane questions designed to obfuscate, for someone else to satisfy every whim and flight of imagination that pops up in Diane's enquiring mind, why doesn't Diane do her own research? And, like was suggested before, don't forget to apply the same questions to the for-profit insurance monstrosity under which we presently suffer. "Fair and balanced!"

Thom, you are right on the money. The shift to sustainable power sources is fragile, and can be broken by a just few percent reduction in incentives. As a solar owner, I would be happy to pay a portion of the transport costs for the power I send back into the grid, but only on a net basis, which is zero for me. And the utilities gain from solar in that their need to build out capacity has dropped. So, unless they can show financial harm from distributed generation, we need to resist this money-grab.