FYI, since so many people have asked
"Who is advocating socialized medicine in the USA"
I am.
Universal Single Payer health care (USPHC) would not only continue to bankrupt this nation because USPHC will fail to limit expenses, it would actually speed up the rising costs of health care without substantially improving the nation's health.
What we have now is ALSO bankrupting this nation without substanitally im0proving our health care services, but it isn't doing it as quickly as USPHC surely will.
I believe we basically have two choices: either we fully socialize health care or we get the USA out of the business of providing health care for ANYONE and start letting poor people die.
The percentage of the gross national product that the USA is currently spending on health care has risen 300% in the last thirty years. (it'sa gone from a little over 5% of the GDP to 17% GDP in the last thirty years, folks)
This trend of investing more and more of our GDP for health care cannot continue indefinitely
Thus far, neither party offers us a solution to the absrud rise in health care prices.
And for those of you who are going to tell me how badly screwed up socialized medicine might become?
I completely understand those complaints.
I quite agree that socialized medicine might become a total nightmare. Doesn't have to, but it certainly could if done badly.
But folks, what we have now is becoming a nightmare, too, and that trend is not going to get any better if we do nothing.
A 300% increase in percertages of GDP spend on healthcare in 30 years?
And in the meanwhile people's health care insurance is becoming less and less useful to them?!
That kind of growth in the aggregate cost of health care is just NOT sustainable.
You have to look at the balance sheets of all the different enterprises involved in our medical care system to understand what the problem is. I don't care which one you look at there is going to be a couple of line items that are going to jump out that contribute heavily to why costs are so high and continue to rise. Those line items are legal and insurance costs. They are in among the rest of the overhead costs related to regulation, research, development and such but they are the dominant factors.
If they were eliminated costs would drop dramatically across the board, but a few other things would happen as well. It would mean that no one was suing anyone else, which would mean a lot of lawyers would be out of work.
I don't advocate removing our ability of being able to seek restitution through our legal system but there should be, and needs to be, some kind of limitations when it is applied to our health care system.
Medical care is not an exact science, it is as much an art as anything else. A "good" doctor is a practitioner, someone who operates on intuition and gut as well as knowledge, but he is also human and fallible.
Our legal system, which is made to provide anyone a means of fighting injustice through restitution, has been highjacked by "For the people" lawyers who have created an industry based on promises that rival lotteries. The path to riches is to get hit by a bus and survive. They sell unrealistic expectations to manipulated juries as fact to prove diabolic intent to get huge sympathy awards. They do this at the individual, regulatory, and corporate levels with the end result being that you and I, or anyone else fortunate enough to still have medical insurance, ulitmately paying for it all.
TORT REFORM people! It's the first step. It's not the last step but nothing can be done without it.