It’s something lots of other folks who are much smarter than me have said.
The real problem with controlling health care costs is the delivery system.
As far as I can see our commercial health care delivery system is about as economically sustainable as a commercial public safety system would be.
According to a report on the BBC website Britain health care costs about $2,992 per capita each year, while in the United States that number is $7,290. That’s a 40% difference. That same report (and reports from a number of other sources) reveals that that difference doesn’t translate into better results for Americans. In fact citizens of Britain and other countries in Europe with public systems appear to enjoy much better outcomes than we see in the U.S.
That’s why I think it might be a good idea to just put our money into building a public health care delivery system like they have in the United Kingdom. Dramatically expand the number of government run or nonprofit community health care centers currently being funded by the U.S. Department of Health and gradually move people out of commercialized health care into public health care.
Sure, there are problems with public health care. The history of the British system speaks for itself. The fact is that most citizens in the U.K. are now pretty satisfied with the service they’re receiving. But the main point is that commercial health care is simply too expensive and can’t be sustained at its current rate of growth. The only way to manage that is to radically change the status quo. Health insurance reform won’t accomplish that. The only way to get this done is to go to a public system and stop throwing money into the maw of the commercial health care beast. Put the doctors, nurses, technicians and administrators on the public payroll and cut out the middleman corporations that drive today’s costs.
A number of months ago, when asked whether I really thought that government bureaucrats running a public system could be trusted, I said that at least government officials could be influenced by public protests if they went wrong. That’s a lot more than can be said of those running commercial health care systems, who have done a masterful job of insulating themselves from public pressure. Here’s another one: if a public official responsible for managing health care involves themselves in fraudulent or abusive activity, they go to jail for official misconduct — a deterrent not available to control the behavior of the cabal of corporate bureaucrats who currently manage most Americans’s access to health care.