medicial reform

recently I have been having some health scares and have been seeing various doctors. And now from personal experience, I can tell my dear readers that our system is completely out of wack.

Because it is an employer-based and profit-motivated system, we get loads of unnecessary tests to bill to insurance rather than to make sure something is nothing. In the rest of the developed world, their health care system is dramatically cheeper and their life expectancy is just as good or better (Japan) than ours.

Why? They don't have loads of officials trying to weasle there way out of paying for something, or asking for people to fill out and copy the same forms a billion times. They share as much equipment and patients as possible, making the cost per a patient dramatically lower.

When the focus is on cost rather than profits, we will practice preventative medicine rather than letting millions of Americans wait until they have to go the emergency room until they get expensive care. There will still be precautionary tests, but we won't have doctors insisting on expensive tests that serve no purpose when it doesn't effect their bottom line.

By pooling patients and doctors, we can reduce medicial insurance and malpractice premiums, instead of creating thousands of little boxes to put people in. The more I think about our system, the madder I get and the more irrational and unnecessary it seems.

The rich could still have supplimental care so that all our super specialists could make their big bucks and do all their fancy tests with pricy machines, but most people would not need to use those super specialists except in rare cases of acute problems.

All this fear of socialism has gotten us into this prediciment. Our people are earning less because premiums go up while wages stay stagnant or lower. Americans are quickly having a competitive disadvantage relative to Europe Canada, etc. when it comes to companies wanting to employ people here. Why else would GM make noises about a single-payer system.

Here's a thought: change federal law so that states like Maine and Massachusetts could try out a single payer system. Then if it works in a place like Massachusetts, with all its teaching hospitals and specialists, it can work nationwide. What is Congress afraid of? Political donations from Pharma and insurance companies drying up?