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I want to commend, and cry over, what WP wrote: "What I am seeing in needy areas are things/conditions I thought only existed in previous distant centuries. The patient populations have been well described by Charles Dickens and depicted graphically by Giordano in his opera set during the French revolution…a stream of ragged peasants limping across the stage, right here in the United States, in 2009." I can vouch for it here in Vermont…right next to Dartmouth's great Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, NH…where - at BEST - most Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Vermont clients CANNOT find a primary care physician (PCP) taking new patients… and where - at WORST - several women I know are choosing to die from their breast cancer because they cannot afford medical care and will not burden their kids or society. One woman has an MA in Counseling, and the other a PhD in Human Nutrition. These are not uneducated people… But they are most definitely poverty-stricken…and were poor before the 2008 global economic collapse.

Workers, 20-30% of whom are uninsured, and an even larger percentage of whom are underinsured, continue to pay the bill for others to get coverage; their payroll taxes help support Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the disabled, for children of low-income parents, and those living in poverty.

Americans conduct their own online medical information research--many as a short-term replacement for visits to providers. Is this a sign of the new peer-to-peer, participatory healthcare?

If the uninsured were a political lobbying group, they'd have more members than AARP. The National Mall couldn't hold them if they decided to march on Washington. But going without health insurance is still seen as a personal issue...The grass-roots group Health Care for America Now plans to bring as many as 15,000 people to Washington this year to lobby Congress for guaranteed coverage.