EDITORIAL: The coming health-care tsunami

Why haven't we enacted any meaningful regulation of the health care industry and tort reform? There are many steps between our current system and national health care. We cannot afford our current entitlement programs, why are we considering more?

A point of clarification - the unfunded liability will become funded as we collect the taxes each year. If we have to raise taxes or lower benefits to balance out - so be it. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't have SS or Medicare? Are you suggesting that children under the age of 18 shouldn't have guaranteed health care? i.e., what's your point? This country wants universal health care. The country wants social security for seniors. There is no alternative to these 2 basic facts. There will be continuing changes to SS & Medicare rules as it becomes necessary to raise more money and delay benefits. BTW - the use of huge "Unfunded Liability" numbers, without explaining the math behind the numbers is bogus.

Few US citizens realize that our government spends more per-capita or as a percentage of GDP on health-programmes (for the old, vets, and public health programmes such as immunization of our kids) than any of the European democracies with universal health provision spend on their entire health services. Our European neighbours also have better health-outcomes in terms of infant-mortality, life-expectancy, and morbidity. To put is succinctly, we pay half as much again as a proportion of our national wealth on health as the French - yet we get a worse service in terms of real outcomes for our population. Since when was rotten value an American virtue? I always thought that value and results (and damn the ideology) were the supreme US virtues. We actually have universal health provision insofar as our hospitals are forced to treat the indigent. However, the present system ensures that for an increasing percentage of our citizens treatment is economically inefficient, substandard, and ruinous. The insurance companies that preside over this farago spend more of the money they extract in premiums in trying to evade claims than in facilitating efficient delivery of medical services. Perhaps we should be looking at systems which deliver better value and better outcomes for ideas rather than trying to fix a system that is broken and imbued with values which are incompatible with decent health-provision. We should be looking at provision via insurers mutually owned by their members, community rating, subsidized insurance for the poor.

These politicians are living in a separate dimension away from reality. Where is the money for all of these entitlements? If there was any such money, it's been more than even up by the Paulsen $1.5 trillion bailouts. The Dems are so ideology-driven that no explanation showing that the numbers simply don't add up for all of these spending programs will suffice for them to modify their plans. We've made a big mistake as a nation giving leadership to such people so divorced from practical reality.

to petemurray. I don't know where you get your facts but the people of those countries with such "great" health insurance - come to the united states when ever they are really ill. Hospitals across our northern border treat as many Canadians as they do Americans and the Brits take health holidays to get their surgery done. Both come to the US for cancer treatment, cataract surgery and hip replacements. Those outcomes you quote are badly skewed because of the number of Immigrants many with lower life expectancies that are included in the US number. The infant mortality rate is skewed because of 70% unwed mothers (many of them teens) in our big cities. That is a moral issue not a health care issue.

I am unable to comment on Canada. However, there are no waiting lists in France or Germany and health technology is on a par or superior to what is available in the US. Neither of these countries ration health-care - unlike the UK where it is rationed on economic grounds and the US where we ration by witholding decent care from those unable to pay. In France the health insurers are owned by their members. This means that the companies devote their energies to bargaining with the medical providers for value and quality on behalf of their members. These non-profit "mutuals", unlike their US counterparts, are not driven to produce profits for third-party shareholders and their priority is not to spend huge administrative resources in trying to evade claims by policy-holders. The second beauty of the French system is that with universal insurance (paid by deduction from the wages of the employed and subsidized by government for the poor) the patient deals with the health-care providers as a consumer. Incidentally, Europe has mass immigration from the third world - in particular, sub-Saharan Africa where AIDS is endemic, and from the former Soviet Union where life-expectancy is in the early 60s. Teenage pregnancy (whether in inner-cities or Alaskan gubernatorial mansions) is only a drag on health-statistics where the mother and child are denied access to decent health-care. All things being equal, teenage pregnancy is less likely to result in infant or maternal death than for women over 30. No, smrs, we in the US pay twice as much of our tax-dollars as the French pay in Euros for worse statistical outcomes. We deserve better. Finally, not all universal health-care is equally good. The (Soviet style direct government provision)UK National Health system is almost as bad statistically as the US situation. Brits regularly travel to France and Belgium to escape health-queues and to avail of medical technologies unavailable at home.

"the US where we ration by witholding decent care from those unable to pay." This is not true, Federal law already forbids any hospital, clinic, or other healhcare facility from denying critical treatment to anyone simply because that person is unable to pay for that treatment, if such treatment is vital to the health of the patient. It is only the non-vital treatments, know as ELECTIVE treatments, that are in "crisis" here in America, and it is this "crisis" that the democrats wan "fixed." In other words, the Democrats wants anyone, at any time, to be able to demand and receive any 'treatment" for any condition imaginable, whether the patient actually needs this "treatment" or not. Do we, as citizens, really what the entire citizenry to pay for someone's breast enhancement "treatments,sexual "reassignment," or any other elective "treatments?" If not, then we need to stop this "fix" for an imaginary "crisis" now, before it's too late.