Health Care: Insurance vs. Coverage = Apples and Oranges

It occurred to me that it is hard to make sense of the debate on health care because the various points of view are bogged down in the muck trying to compare apples and oranges, to use a good analogy. The debaters indiscriminately refer to "insurance" (apples) and "coverage" (oranges) as if they are the same.....but they are not the same.

Nutshell view: health care INSURANCE is not health COVERAGE!!

More: health care INSURANCE is a PRODUCT not a SERVICE!!

CONSEQUENCE: when the health care insurance businesses "cull" bad risks (get rid of very ill patients and cancel their insurance) they are doing what comes naturally as for-profit businesses by doing what is beneficial to their stockholders, maximizing profits. Insurance businesses survive and grow by this practice, so dont blame them for it...blame Americans-as-a-group short-sightedness and blame the lack of understanding of the english language on the part of the media, politicians and citizens. Everyone with an open mouth is, with only few exceptions, making this mistake.

CONCLUSION: America needs a 100% health care COVERAGE system. This can only come by a one-payer national service. The health care insurance businesses still have a role as sellers of insurance policies for extra-ordinary health emergency/specialist treatments.

Serious stuff: what ever happened to the congressional assistqant staff that would have remembered all of this and been able to distinguish "insurance" from "coverage"? This arm of Congress was apparently disbanded for eithepolitical or economizing reasons, or both. The cost to the nation will greatly exceed the cost of continuing that assistance staff. Also, this paralysis of public policy-making is the result of the nation having bought into, at least subliminally, the ideology of privitization beginning with Reagan. The result is as if every American resource is reduce to equivalency as a market item - citizens as labor, oil and minerals, meat animals, real estate,... everything. America seems to have lost the concept of itself as a nation of people first and above all.