I performed a quick online check of these funds to unscientifically ascertain the extent of these public employee investments. The Calstrs website doesn’t make it easy to determine such information, but Calpers, with quite a few clicks, does make the information available. Calpers lists 4,856 stocks they invest in spread over hundreds of online pages, all in alphabetical order. The largest for-profit health corporation in our country, Wellpoint, they hold 1,657,091 shares.

So where are we to save in health care? Should the retirees who depend on their health care investments making a decent return take a shot? Should the nurses be the ones? Should the doctors who spend years developing finely honed skills take the shot? What we always hear (from the President on down) is an undefined, amorphous complaint against “corporations,” as if we were talking of 19th Century style corporations run by crypto Rockefeller’s or Carnegie’s.

In probably the least mentioned fact about this issue, and perhaps the most sobering, is pointing out the fact that Kaiser Permanente is a non-profit organization. It is the largest health care organization in our country. Yet a brief examination of their website reveals that the non-profit cost of covering a couple amounts to more than $1,000.00 a month.

The fact of the matter is that, like most anything else in modern life, coming ‘to terms’ with difficult issues, such as health reform in this case, requires a much more subtler and conciliatory approach than is often met in ‘blogs.’ The appeal is largely emotional, and not illuminating or ultimately edifying. The ‘facts’ that people choose to rail against are usually carefully cherry-picked to make their argument easier to make. The net result is that a useful perspective, one which would suggest an ameliorating recourse to current situations, is never a notable objective in ‘blog debates.’

To borrow a phrase, there are simply too many ‘inconvenient truths’ for all parties to face to make any serious health reform likely. In other words, it’s in the interest of too many people to largely have the system remain as it is; those who have an interest in having it different are too few and too powerless.