What is your opinion of the United States health care system?

Is it “broken”? Is it perfectly fine? What can we do to help those who are uninsured?

It depends on how you mean. If you can afford to pay for your own care, the US system is the best in the world. Rich people come here from all over the world for health care. If you are a corporation providing health care or pharmaceuticals this is the best system because it’s the most profitable. In the US we consider profit the highest of all values.

However if you’re a middle-class healthcare consumer, you wouldn’t like this system. Those of us who have health insurance pay 70% more for it today than when GW Bush came to office, and it was considered a crisis -then-. A growing number of Americans can’t get access to health care at all.

I am self-employed in my own little one-man business, but I can’t buy insurance for myself, it would cost between $1500 and $2000 a month–and that’s if I never get sick. I use my wife’s insurance, and if she lost her job I’d have to go get a job myself.

The solution most Americans want is a ‘Canadian style single-payer’ plan. This means that hospitals and clinics and doctors remain private and the govt. handles the insurance, and everyone is insured, included in the same big pool. If we just expanded Medicare to include everyone we’d save tens of billions of dollars a year in the US. Medicare has a 1% overhead while private insurance has 20-30%.

But all the major candidates get money from the healthcare and pharma industries, so the plans they come up with are mostly bullshit. Most include the govt. buying insurance for -some- uninsured at the going market prices, which include big profits for the existing insurance companies. The only candidate so far who’s proposed a Canadian-style plan is Dennis Kucinich.

Screw Health Care Reform! The United States Needs More McDonalds!

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