I have just listened to several ad hoc economic geniuses explain that we cannot afford to maintain health care at the level we have now. Their argument went something like this:
If you calculate how much people have been putting into our health care programs, and compare that with how much health care is costing us, we will go broke.
Their conclusion: we have to cut benefits now. It does no good to wait.
What they do not compute is that our health care system costs us about twice as much as health care costs most other industrialized nations, and we don't even serve millions of people. What they do not compute is that having insurance companies stand between the money people have paid in, and the medical community that provides the care, is a horrible skimming-off process. The twenty or thirty percent that the insurance companies keep does not provide health care. It provides enormous profits. Just look at what insurance companies have paid their chief executives. It can scarcely be comprehended.
The solution, plainly and simply, is a single-payer system. Let the government collect the money, administer it, and pay it to those who provide health care.
There is no reason on this good, green earth why we cannot provide health care as well as any other nation on earth, with the possible exception of Canada, where Sarah Palin admits she has gone when she really needed care, although she is against nationalized health care unless it benefits her. Which it never does. Or hardly ever did. Except when she crossed the border into Whitehorse.
(Incidentally, she lied about that, too, until recently. Earlier she said she had gone to Juneau for that care.)
If you calculate how much people have been putting into our health care programs, and compare that with how much health care is costing us, we will go broke.
Their conclusion: we have to cut benefits now. It does no good to wait.
What they do not compute is that our health care system costs us about twice as much as health care costs most other industrialized nations, and we don't even serve millions of people. What they do not compute is that having insurance companies stand between the money people have paid in, and the medical community that provides the care, is a horrible skimming-off process. The twenty or thirty percent that the insurance companies keep does not provide health care. It provides enormous profits. Just look at what insurance companies have paid their chief executives. It can scarcely be comprehended.
The solution, plainly and simply, is a single-payer system. Let the government collect the money, administer it, and pay it to those who provide health care.
There is no reason on this good, green earth why we cannot provide health care as well as any other nation on earth, with the possible exception of Canada, where Sarah Palin admits she has gone when she really needed care, although she is against nationalized health care unless it benefits her. Which it never does. Or hardly ever did. Except when she crossed the border into Whitehorse.
(Incidentally, she lied about that, too, until recently. Earlier she said she had gone to Juneau for that care.)
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