Verified answer

yes, there should be reform

I share your concern. GHW Bush had a health plan proposal, then Clinton had one (or Hillary's if you look at it that way) and now Hillary has her own proposal. All of these plans had something in common--buying health insurance for -some- uninsured through existing health insurance corporations at their going price. In other words, they all have the 'incidential' effect of enhancing the profits of the existing health insurance industry.

What most Americans want, and they say so again and again in polls, is a 'Canadian Style' single-payer plan. This means eliminating the commercial insurance companies and their overhead and profit. Medicare is an example of this, the government acts as the insurer and overhead goes from 25% to 1 or 2%. We only have Medicare in the first place because the insurance companies didn't want to insure the elderly or chronically ill. So -we- do that for them. If we could simply expand Medicare to cover everyone in the country we would immediately save tens of billions of dollars a year.

Republicans like to call this 'socialized medicine', but it isn't. The health care providers are still private and commercial, and they still compete, just as they do now under Medicare. Socialized medicine is where the doctors work for the govt. and the govt. owns the hospitals, as with Britain's National Health Service. But calling it 'socialized medicine' shows two things, (1) that we can change peoples' opinions about anything by calling it 'socialist and (2) that rank-and-file Republicans don't really understand what socialism is to begin with.

President Clinton also proposed a program that would have made vaccines available to all the children of America at public cost. He showed how this would be cost-effective because we would save cost of caring for the kids who got sick from preventable diseases like TB and tetanus. The drug companies would have made a fair profit. But the proposal was killed by the drug companies! They realized that they could make a bigger profit selling vaccines to 80% of kids at the going rate than 100% of the kids at a 'fair' profit. And these vaccines were developed at public expense!

It just goes to show how our version of capitalism is warped in the US. The highest priority in our health care policy should be HEALTH, instead it is profits.

1. The US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. It is almost twice as expensive as every other developed nation. This is largely due to administrative costs which account for 19-25% of healthcare costs, and up to 34% at for-profit hospitals.

2. Other than South Africa, America is the only developed country in the world that does not provide healthcare for all of its citizens.

3. Yet, the US ranks 26th in infant mortality and 24th in the number of healthy years a person can expect to live - putting America’s healthcare system in the company of Cuba and Slovenia rather than Canada and Western European nations.

4. Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004.

5. And, despite ludicrous right-wing anecdotal claims of high dissatisfaction among those who live in countries with universal healthcare, the reality is that, with the exception of Italy, Americans are more dissatisfied with their healthcare than are the citizens of every other developed nation, including England, France, Germany, and Canada. Moreover, US doctors spend less time with patients that do doctors in other nations.

http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

http://pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices/releases/20070613...

WHO ranking of healthcare systems:

1 France

2 Italy

3 San Marino

4 Andorra

5 Malta

6 Singapore

7 Spain

8 Oman

9 Austria

10 Japan

11 Norway

12 Portugal

13 Monaco

14 Greece

15 Iceland

16 Luxembourg

17 Netherlands

18 United Kingdom

19 Ireland

20 Switzerland

21 Belgium

22 Colombia

23 Sweden

24 Cyprus

25 Germany

26 Saudi Arabia

27 United Arab Emirates

28 Israel

29 Morocco

30 Canada

31 Finland

32 Australia

33 Chile

34 Denmark

35 Dominica

36 Costa Rica

37 United States of America

38 Slovenia

39 Cuba

40 Brunei

41 New Zealand

42 Bahrain

43 Croatia

44 Qatar

45 Kuwait

46 Barbados

47 Thailand

48 Czech Republic

49 Malaysia

50 Poland

http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html

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Sway_27 –

Is that the reason the government run Medicare program is the most efficient and effective healthcare system in America?

Maybe GOVERNMENT Health Insurance would do that, but the plans now being proposed involve mandatory enrollment in a PRIVATE program, and the Insurance Corporations will refuse to pay exorbitant bills and the Health Providers will keep in line.

Yes, the government has alreay prove that they cannot successfully "negotiate" lower prices for anything.

Obvioulsy you're too thick to understand my answer. Or maybe you guys are just so used to calling me out that you cant see it when I agree with you

It all depends on how it is structured. Everything gets negotiated and with NHC, there is one party doing the negotiating for everyone.