From TPM Reader MB ...

One of the drawbacks of members of Congress and the federal government having such great health care is that they really don't realize how bad private insurance is for the rest of us.

For a while I was self-employed and uninsured, not because I felt I didn't need health insurance, but because I had been paying lots of money for supposedly good health insurance and when I needed it, found there were so many catches and limits that it was essentially worthless. Why spend all that money for something that doesn't do what it's supposed to do?

If Congress is going to require us to buy insurance, we had better be able to buy good insurance. I don't want to be forced to spend hundreds of dollars every month, a considerable chunk of my income, for something that is essentially worthless when I get sick. I know people who have had better experience with private health insurance, but I also know plenty of people who have had the same problems I did, even people with great health insurance they get through their work. Denied treatments, rejected claims, endless red tape, a lot of politicians seem to think if everyone buys insurance, the problem will be solved, but that doesn't get to the heart of the issue: That private insurance is an adversarial system designed to limit the amount of care you get and maximize the amount of money that can be extracted from its customers.