The Stony Brook Meal Plan is like Health Care Reform

When I went to college for my first semester they required you to sign up for a meal plan. There were three choices and they all cost the same. You could have 3 meals a day for five days at one of five locations on campus and $500 in extra spending cash to spend wherever you wanted. You could have 2 meals a day for five days and $1000 in spending cash or you could just have $2500 on your card and spend it where you like and when you liked. I took the middle plan. I liked the meals. They were buffet or restaurant style meals. I ate a lot of salads and lost weight. The next year they came up with a new plan. The new plan was they added up all the cost of all their facilities, people and shipping costs, divided it by the number of students on campus and asked you to pay up front the costs of all of the food service. Then whatever extra money you chose to put on would purchase food at cost. So the plan was whenever you went somewhere to eat you'd pay $1 for a hamburger and $0.25 for a drink. For one, no one believed these to be the true costs but putting that aside all of the buffet/restaurant places closed down and were replaced with fast food joints like taco bell, burger king, pizza and Chinese. No more salads and chicken for me. I gained weight. The quality and quantity of the food went down. Looking back I realized that they had no incentive to sell good food. They already had your money. The more you bought the more they lost and the less you bought the more they gained. What a great scam. The only good place on campus and the place I usually ate was the student activity center which only accepted cash.
The Stony Brook meal plan is analogous to the current Health care reform. They will have all your money up front and dole out medical care at a supposed bargain without any need to be competitive, cost effective, efficient, or effective. You will not be the customer any more, you will be the end user. The government will be the customer. In fact the worse the state of health care the more people will join the government plan and the more they can control how we live. Good luck with that.