Editorial “Bad medicine” is subtitled: “If Medicaid were operated like Medicare, it wouldn’t be a broken system, and low-income people wouldn’t pay so much for health care.”
WATCHDOG: It would have been even better if this worthy article went on to say: If state and federal governments need to fix the broken health care system, perhaps our elected officials should begin by reforming ‘Obama Care’ to conform to the Medicare model.
If our entire health system were operated like Medicare, we would be rated as one of the best served nations in the world, rather than 38th, just two places ahead of Cuba.
We would also dramatically cut our costs by at least a third from the current over 18% of Gross Domestic Budget. The generally acknowledged best health care system in the world is provided by France – at a cost of about 11% of its GDP.
The USA currently spends a third more per capita than Norway, the second most expensive health care system, and 2 ½ times the average per person of other advanced nations.
Neighboring Canada with its ‘Single Payer System’ is rated as 30th in quality of health care, eight places ahead of the USA, and they do that at about half our cost!
Half our costs and better health care… think about it!
Health care and superfluous defense expenditures are bleeding our nation dry, preventing modernization, and impoverishing our younger and future generations.
When will people wake up and force reforms despite special interests? The best and quickest reforms being ‘Medicare for everyone’ and adopting the French Health Card system, whereby everyone has a health card with a computer chip that provides his or her full health care information since conception (including family history.) It also facilitates automatic billing of the health system administrator. Doctor review records and generate invoices from their desk top computers. That’s it!
When reforms are accomplished, instead of having let’s say six or more non-medical personnel throughout the health care system for each doctor, there will only be need for say one non-medical person for say six doctors.
Cut back health care by 6% of GDP, defense spending by 3%, and eliminate the excessive and wrongheaded aspects of the War on Drugs to save another 1%, and we will free up 10% of GDP to balance the budget and for private and governmental investment.
That is the prescription for renewing America. There is no other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranking_of_health_systems
