So the next time some one rattles off govt takeover, tell them this.
Health care costs, and especially insurance premiums need to be brought down. This is imperative and everyone can agree that they want lower premiums. There are a couple ways to do this. Obama has supported the most free market, competition friendly way to do this by supporting a public option. It's a plan that will bring down the costs by competing with other private plans. It gets no special help from the govt itself.
Without a public option, we will still need to control costs,
only we will have to do it much more directly. By making regulations that either dictate how much profit an insurance company is allowed to make and dictate how much it must pay out for patient care, or actually fix prices for medical procedures at a Federal level.
Now between competition between two plans on the one hand and the govt dictating how much profit insurance companies are allowed to make on the other,
which approach sounds more like socialism to you ?