But then I read articles like this from The New Yorker.

Or this from The Atlantic (excerpts below).

Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is. We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance. Most pregnancies are planned, and deliveries are predictable many months in advance, yet they’re financed the same way we finance fixing a car after a wreck—through an insurance claim..

Between 1970 and 2006, annual Medicare payments to hospitals grew by roughly 3,800 percent, from $5 billion to $192 billion. Total annual hospital-care costs for all patients grew from $28 billion to almost $650 billion during that same period. Since 1975, hospitals’ enormous revenue growth has occurred despite a 35 percent decline in the number of hospital beds, no meaningful increase in total admissions, and an almost 50 percent decline in the average length of stay. High-tech equipment has been dispersed to medical practices, recovery periods after major procedures have shrunk, and pharmaceutical therapies have grown in importance, yet over the past 40 years, hospitals have managed to retain the same share (roughly one-third) of our nation’s health-care bill.

And it becomes clear that we have much bigger issues to tackle aside from adopting a single-payer system. Our entire attitude towards health care needs adjustment and I’m not so confident that Obama’s plan does much of anything to address that.

Do I just accept that this is one step on a much larger journey to reforming American health care?