And you also have to remember that the bulk of most malpractice awards is for medical bills, meaning it goes back to providers or to the health insurers. With that gone, claims will drop dramatically. No need to worry about the cost of care.

And the NHS works so well that no one with any money pays out-of-pocket for private health care–NOT!

And in the United SueMeStates of America, what will happen the very first time someone with a lawyer on speed dial does NOT get what they want, think they need, what they saw on TV, or what their grandmother got!!

We will not wait quietly in lines for hours for substandard care by a disinterested doc who has 98 more patients to see before lunch..

For some reason, they and their lobbyists are either unwilling, afraid, or simply opposed to separating themselves from the Medicare/Medicaid system en masse like we need to do to get back to a more straightforward transaction.

Your alternative prescription for complete socialization of health care finance has the virtue of being ideologically clear. Of course, this solution would guarantee the collapse of medicine as a progressive (in the true sense of that word) profession. Instead, medicine would become another public utility, with all of the concomitant mediocrity. Any doctor who couldn’t tolerate their every decision subject to the whims of bureaucrats would quit. To the extent that they could tolerate this, they wouldn’t be the kind of physician I would like to ask for treatment.

And, if you think insurance company bureaucrats are just as bad as government bureaucrats, you are not being imaginative enough. At bottom, the government is force, pure and simple. Egged on by their constituents, from whom they derive their power, a politician has no interest in actually solving problems. He seeks only to appear to do so. See our current budget/deficit debacle as only the most obvious symptom of this fundamental reality.

As for me, I do not wish my options for treatment to be decided by vote. I much prefer the chance to use my own earned wherewithal to determine the best tradeoff between expense and care, for myself and my loved ones. Currently, even with the government controlling half of every health care dollar, there are still such choices available to me. When the government pays for all health care, these choices will become increasingly rare, both by fiat and by the decisions of innovators to abandon their pursuit of new approaches, knowing that those same bureaucrats will be determining whether they allowed to innovate.

If you really wanted to reduce the cost and increase the quality of medical care, you would advocate the solution that has worked in every other human endeavor – Laissez-Faire!

Roger Zimmerman
Just a Patient, thinking for himself.

Here I am joining my ideological enemies of the Right in their opposition. The least I can do is present an alternative vision.
The minimum would be a Public Option. Better yet, Single Payer. Optimally, Universal National Health Care. How can we be so blind to the obvious? All of the rest of the developed world, and some of the undeveloped world, spends half and receives statistically better health care. Imagine the effect of a 50% reduction in health care expenditures on our burgeoning national debt. If we lack the imagination to create something unique, a new American Health Care System rooted in both evidence based and cost effective health care, at least we could just copy number one, France, or maybe one of the Scandinavian countries. Less effectively, we could look into Medicare or the VA, where administrative overhead arguably may run as low as 3%.
To counter the front end loading of cost incident to establishing a new system, why not abandon our growing commitment to war without end, our pathetic determination to foist our dysfunctional form of government off on other unwilling states, our endless meddling in the internal affairs of others, and our self appointed role as the heavily armed watch captain violently prowling the world’s neighborhood.
No matter where you stand on these issues, it is apparent that we cannot continue down this road of wealth transfer, endless war, ever increasing spending, ever increasing debt, and ever decreasing taxation. Worse than the inevitable consequence of national bankruptcy is the growing threat of blood in our streets.
We are Physicians, Emergency Physicians. We have an obligation to our patients and to ourselves to promote an improved, higher quality, and more cost effective system of health care delivery. We also have a human obligation to our country and to our world to oppose violence, promote peace and understanding, and to join as a group in trying to promote realistic political solutions to the problems facing all of us.
Dwight Burdick, MD, FACEP

If not, why not? If so, where’d they come down on it?

That’s probably the most important healthcare news of the week, year, decade.

Please tell me this is a joke! I can’t tell.