>>I completely agree with Hugo that people can balance the benefits of various employers or universities before they make a choice. If a particular employer or university has a policy that really offends, then don't apply!
>
>But you know it's not really as easy as that. On universities, there are a ton of factors, including whether you get accepted. Cost, location, programs available, and a ton of other things are likely to weigh in before you consider health insurance.
>
>As for employers, yeah, you and I can pick and choose, and make the decision based on benefits. For lots of people, that's not realistic. What we really need to do in this country is decouple health insurance from employment. Our system is a historical accident and it's absurd.
>

I don't think there was anything accidental about the way the insurance and health care industries fought off President Obama's health care reform plan. He did get something through, which every President for decades had tried and failed to do, but they really got it watered down. There is something seriously wrong when corporate profitability trumps the health care of the citizenry.

Not too long ago there was a letter to the editor in The New Yorker from a Canadian woman, in response to a recent article about health care. She wrote that she had recently delivered a child, with some complications, and the total cost to her and her husband was $5 -- and that was for parking. Canada spends less on health care than we do, with no sign that the quality of care is inferior. In fact I have read the opposite other than maybe some esoteric high end procedures.

Health care is very much on my mind these days. You know this from our weekly conversation but no one else here does. My dad has been in the hospital for over a week, awaiting brain surgery tomorrow morning. He is lucid and in reasonably good spirits, considering. He fell down in his kitchen and banged his head pretty hard. They think he may have had a stroke. In any case he was found unconscious and was taken to the hospital. The delay before surgery has been because one of his many medications is a blood thinner, and they need to wean him from that so the blood will clot during surgery. Ironically, the docs now think the problem is not an excess of blood around the brain -- subdural hematoma -- but one or more blood clots in his brain. That is a trickier matter. It was believed at first that this would be the same procedure he had once before, drilling a hole in his head and letting the excess blood drain out. Now they have to find and remove the blood clot(s), and then hope more don't return. I talked to him on the phone within the past hour (I have been calling and talking with him for half an hour or an hour a day every day) and he sounded noticeably shakier today. A doctor had just been in before I called, evidently legalese -- there are always risks in surgery, you have to give us the okay to proceed, yada yada yada. We did not evade the facts of the matter but I think I also succeeded in perking up his spirits a little. Some sports talk, the lingua franca of guys. He gave me the schedule for tomorrow and I will call my sister Rachel post-surgery tomorrow afternoon to find out how it went.