Medicare is bankrupt. Medicaid owes hospitals, health care providers and ambulance services HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars dating back to 2004. Dirigo is bankrupt and millions in the red.

No wonder private insurance is so expensive. The people who have it are being billed triple (and more) to keep the hospitals afloat! The government programs are going to SINK us.

If you are uninsured and does not have insurance, you should check out the website http://UninsuredAmerica.blogspot.com - John Mayer, California

yea, just what we need government run health care. you'll see

I'm not going to pretend I understand this whole issue, but if the drift I think I'm getting is government controlled (payed) insurance, I have a problem with that, because it isn't changing anything. Those who work will still be carrying those who don't or won't and the government will up the workers taxes because of it.

It would best serve us all if medical care was reduced in cost, by a lot. Like cereal was.

Single payer coverage can't be that bad; all the US senators and representatives seem to be satisfied with their single payer health care. It has to be more efficient if you take the huge profits out of the system.

If you think health insurance is expensive now.. wait until it's free !!!.

Single-payer is the only type of system that works, and there's literally fifty years of economic research, not to mention actual practice, to back it up. You won't find any other nation in the western world that has as bad a healthcare system as us, no spending more money. In fact, we spend 60% of total global healthcare spending, but don't even manage to break the top twenty in efficiency and outcomes, and we have one of the lowest life expectancy averages in the industrialized world. The rest of the world continues to laugh at us........

Scintillate, the idea here is that the lowest cost way to provide for healthcare costs is a single payer. The reason for that is because it cuts out the redundant administration (the largest part of the overhead cost of insurance) needed to run several insurance companies instead of one. Also, it spread the risk pool across a larger group of people. Especially important is including younger people, because number one, they are less likely to need to use the service as much, lowering the net cost to EVERYONE. Number two, the younger people who have access to insurance now will likely be much healthier and require much less cost to maintain their health as they age as people under the current "get insurance only when you're sick" system. Of course your taxes will go up, but not anymore than the costs of paying for private health insurance. What I see, though, is a cost much less than the cost of the current system. For instance, the Canadians pay a fairly high tax to subsidize their system, but think of that in comparison to people paying 200 dollars or more weekly to a private insurer to provide medical care for their families....medical care that doesn't nearly match the quality found in most other industrialized nations.

Granted, sinlge-payer isn't without its flaws, but the small flaws of a single payer system are much less grave than the fundamental flaws in the current system.

Well said Joshua. I hear so many people lament on how the government will tax them to death under a single payer system, but they seem to forget how much they are paying now for a system that does not work. Most working families pay around $800 a month for insurance (after you combine personal and employer payments). And for that we get substandard care, and are at the mercy of the whims of the insurance companies. Insurance companies are in business to make a profit, and every penny of profit that they take is money that is not being spent on you or your children's care. I don't understand why that is so hard to understand.

jaguarsky, this always seems to be the case when you append the word "tax" to any statement. Apparently "premium" doesn't have the same affect? The majority of American people seem to be very foolish in the face of silly political rhetoric.....

Let’s assume for argument sake that a single payor system is more efficient in financing healthcare than private insurance. Now let’s address the real problem. Our healthcare system is designed to deal with folks who are already sick. We do not focus nearly enough on staying healthy. In our new single payor utopia are we going to continue to pay for poor lifestyle choices (smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise)? Are we going to continue to wait until people are sick and spend most of our healthcare dollars in the final months or years of peoples lives because they refused to change and take ownership in their health? Why should I pay taxes/premiums and subsidize the next guy’s poor choices? After we have reaped the “windfall” by ridding ourselves from the profiteering insurance companies, who is going to have the courage to address the real cost issues in our healthcare system. In short, who is going to say “No”. Who is going to say - no we are not going to pay for your poor choices that have made you sick. No we are not going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep you father alive for 2 more weeks. These questions remain unanswered because most of us afraid to address the real cost issues as it relates to the need for Americans to take responsibility for their own health.

SteveH, poor lifestyle choices do contribute heavily to healthcare costs, and I think that addressing this will be an important part of any reform the nation undertakes in this area, but also consider that one of the reasons our healthcare system focuses so heavily on the sick and dying is because the young and healthy are the least likely to be able to afford or otherwise procure health insurance. Without these people paying in the ratio of pay-outs to premium inputs is much higher. Also consider that having access to adequate medical care, including primary care, over a person's lifespan will almost certainly lead to better health, and less healthcare expense, later in life. Take a long-term chronic disease for an example. If we are able to, say, control high blood pressure earlier in life then the cost will be much less over the life of that patient than if they were to go years without insurance and have several heart-attacks later in life. Genetic testing is also an area where I think development needs to occur, because that would give us some idea of steps we should be taking to avoid certain chronic diseases down the road. Also consider that a person without insurance who is sick enough to go to a doctor usually has to go to the emergency room (except in places with walk-in clinics), costing several hundred, if not thousand dollars for something that could have been treated by a primary care provider or even a nurse at a walk-in clinic for less than a hundred dollars (save for prescription costs, if any). I think that the cost drivers you cite are as much the result of a broken, ineffective healthcare cost-provision system as anything. for instance, many states have decided that insurance companies have to keep paying in situations like the ones you portray, so the difference there would be negligible. Finally, great lifestyle choices aren't going to guarantee you anything, and the reason you should have to pay premiums to help take care of others who are sick is because you could just as easily be in the same situation. Very weak argument....

"SteveH, poor lifestyle choices do contribute heavily to healthcare costs, and I think that addressing this will be an important part of any reform the nation undertakes in this area" i.e. mandate through law what you can and can't eat, what activities you can and can't do and where and when you can do them. More government interference with our lives.

A single payer system takes away your freedom to choose, and places the decisions in the hands of a bunch of political hacks, who have absolutely no positive track record in reforming or improving any thing else they have ever touched.

The cost of healthcare will skyrocket as a result of the government getting involved. If you look back at the history of healthcare costs you will see that the costs started to climb when the government got involved in the first place.

To Captain Andy, who wrote that Medicare is bankrupt – please note that it is under the current system that Medicare and Medicaid cervices are in trouble. Under HR 676 there would be a complete overhaul of the system, and the for-profit-health-insurance-scam we are burdened with would be removed from the scene. Also, one of the big problems for our current Medicare problems is the fact that other parties (not Medicare itself) have defrauded the government. From some unscrupulous doctors and hospitals over billing for services to durable good manufacturers billing for wheelchairs for patients when the patient didn't need the wheelchair and the doctor who supposedly prescribed the chair has been long dead (http://finance.senate.gov/hearings/testimony/2005test/NMTest062805.pdf).

Medicare is not the problem. The for-profit-healthscare-system is the problem. Support HR 676

BRAVO MEG, BRAVO -- A well balanced article on Healthcare Reform for a change. I only wish that Senator Baucus would be as impartial! From one of the Baucus 13.

Nivloc,

Medicare and Medicaid are not, as you say, "in trouble". They are BANKRUPT! There is NO "trustfund", no money.

Try as you might to soft peddle and shift blame, here is the fact. These Government programs are unsustainable and are a complete, total, utter financial FAILURE. Why, given that proven track record of failure would anyone with half a brain give government bureaucrats more control????

If you are uninsured and does not have insurance, you should check out the website http://UninsuredAmerica.blogspot.com - John Mayer, California

If you are uninsured and does not have insurance, you should check out the website http://UninsuredAmerica.blogspot.com - John Mayer, California