McClatchy:

But with Congress now shaping legislation, a thorny political question hangs over the debate: How much will middle-class Americans benefit and will it be enough to win their support? ...

"The middle class absolutely is the constituency that will determine" the outcome of the health care debate this year, said Len Nichols, director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. "It will come down to Obama's portrayal of the benefits of the new world" of change versus the status quo of rising premiums and the difficulties of getting individual insurance.

"All this is complicated," Nichols said. "All this is hard to show."

Americans who are going to pay a lot of the bill for covering the uninsured are being asked to believe in a different kind of payoff — one that is appealing but more difficult to quantify than the subsidies needed to help cover poorer people. Look past the price tag of legislation, Obama is saying, to a future of smaller premium increases and guaranteed coverage even if you lose your job or become sick.

Now, that's truly inspirational, isn't it?

Personally, I'd rather see a future where health care is a right, we have better care, our costs dropped by half to, say, the level of Australia's where they live longer anyhow, and we saved $350 billion dollars a year with single payer, but Obama took all that off the table because "health care" "reform" in Versailles is really about keeping the insurance companies in business and not much else and Max Baucus can blow me. Eeew. So not.

The insurance industry has agreed [voluntarily, meaning they'll renege as soon as they can] to stop denying coverage because of a medical problem if all Americans are insured. Universal coverage also could help tamp down insurance increases, the administration argues. Today, hospitals and doctors often pass the cost of treating the uninsured to people with insurance by charging them higher rates.

And not by taxing insurance benefits, for example...

In the current deep recession, these potential benefits are attractive to millions of people, polls show. But many Americans [rightly] remain doubtful they'll personally benefit from the changes. Some worry [rightly] that the huge cost of guaranteeing insurance for everyone — the 10-year cost of reform legislation might be $1 trillion or more — will come out of their wallets or harm their coverage.

The American people are 100% right to worry that the Democrats will fuck them over and stick them with the bill. That already happened with the bailouts for the banksters, right? $350 billion is a lot to leave on the table, so obviously, saving money isn't the first priority. If it were, single payer would be on the table. So what is the first priority, then?