These are the questions about health care that I would like to have answered. Because one of the stock ways to answer uncomfortable questions seems to have become to point out that there is no one bill at this point, and they have differing provisions, wherever I ask about the bill, it would be clear that the respondent can answer based upon any of the different versions, even cherry-picking the version that provides the most reassuring answer, even if that version is clearly problematical on some other issue. To state it another way, I am seeking to preclude the evasive answer, "oh, we don't have one bill at this point, so we can't give a specific answer."

1. Obama has repeatedly said, "If you like your health insurance and your doctor, you can keep them." What that would suggest, but what he has been very careful not to say, is, "You will be free to choose your doctor and your health insurance." When I read the bill, it strikes me that you can be locked into your current plan, with no choice but to go onto the prescribed alternative plan (government, co-op, whatever it ends up being). Will I, or my employer, be free to choose from competing private insurance plans, and if so, where does it say that in any of the draft bills?
2. Obama has repeatedly said that this plan will not add a dime to the deficit, without identifying any additional funding. The CBO has said that it without offsetting funding, it will add $1 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Those statements cannot both be true. Which one is the lie? If the answer is that neither one is a lie because Obama plans to increase taxes so that no deficit result, exactly which taxes are going to be increased, and how much, to accomplish this?
3. Obama has repeatedly denied that this is a government takeover of health care, and the proposed bills do not seem to dictate that specifically. But there are a number of things that suggest movement a fair piece down the road toward eventual government takeover of health care. And Obama himself has stated a preference for single-payer health care with a recognition that there would need to be a transition process. Given that, if this is NOT a step down the road toward a single-payer government health care system, then why does Obama support it?
4. The various bills create a number of new agencies (with some variation from bill to bill). These would seem to have little place in a system where the objective is to remain a private-insurance system but to reduce costs by cutting administrative overhead. Introducing this many new agencies into the system would appear to be one way to guarantee that overhead will increase, if nothing else because the costs of running the agencies themselves will add to overhead. One role that I can see for those agencies is that they would be very helpful to have in place to ease the transition to a government-run single-payer system, but aside from that I don't really see what they will accomplish except to spend more money on what is already an overpriced activity. What will these agencies accomplish that will benefit a private health care system, and what assurances do we have in the bill that these agencies won't be used to facilitate the transition to a government-run single-payer system?
5. Obama has stated that his "reforms" will not lead to euthanizing the elderly and disabled. However, other countries that have gone down the road to single-payer systems have encountered difficulty rationing scarce medical resources. In some cases (like the UK NHS) they have resorted to excluding certain groups from health care because of age or disability. That is a legitimate fear in large part because the proposed Council for Comparative Effectiveness very closely resembles the kinds of organizations that have been used to develop standards for rationing and effectively euthanizing in those systems. The legitimacy of that fear is heightened because of the reasonable expectation that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who has advocated such rationing schemes in print, is quite likely to be a member of such a council, and at the very least instrumental in its direction. What assurances do we have that the Council for Comparative Effectiveness (or any other agency) will not become a vehicle for deciding that certain groups must be denied health care in order for other groups to receive it? And what options will people in denied groups have to obtain the denied health care on their own nickel? Where in the bill are these protections found?

I would ask one more question if given the chance: Why are we trying to reinvent the wheel with health care instead of taking an existing model that has been successful and adapting it? Since the French model is generaly regarded as the gold standard, why are we not simply taking it and adapting it?