Healthcare in America

Healthcare has become my great white whale over the past week or so. It seemed so simple at first, dash off a quick column about the need for a single payer system to bring the United States up to par with the rest of the industrialized world and then move merrily along to my thoughts on Rudy's chances at the Republican nomination. Then, like Ahab, what seemed like a run of the mill fishing expedition became an intractable dilemma, that dilemma became an obsession.

The problem with me for writing about healthcare in America is the numbers. At its core, the healthcare debate is all about numbers. Virtually all Americans realize that a system that will cost 20% of our GDP by 2010 and yet provides mediocre care at best for most of our citizens needs to fixed. We all know that there is something not quite right when the richest country in the history of the world is unable to provide basic health insurance for 47 million of its citizens. In short, the systems is broken and needs to be fixed, but what happens next?

Well if you are the President, and if you are you really shouldn't be wasting your time reading my opinions, then you think the problem can be solved with capping malpractice awards and healthcare savings accounts. Setting aside for a moment that doctors make hundreds of thousands of mistakes every year, not a few of which wind up in serious injury or death for their patients, the fact is that malpractice insurance accounts for less than one percent of the annual increase in healthcare spending is meaningless to you. Also, the fact that one needs to have money to put in their health savings account is lost on you as well. Generally speaking, the administration's ideas on healthcare are much like their ideas on most things, useless and possibly harmful.