The U.S. must join the rest of the Western world and ensure that every American has access to modern healthcare. We will however accomplish nothing worthwhile if we provide universal healthcare insurance and don't have a real plan to deliver healthcare to the 46 million Americans who are now uninsured. Liberals, conservatives and moderates in Congress have developed innumerable insurance schemes, electronic medical record systems, a cliché or two about living healthy lives, tax mechanisms to pay the bill but have no plan to actually deliver healthcare the day after they congratulate themselves on reforming the "healthcare system". Maybe they can borrow George Bush's "Mission Accomplished" sign.
Those of us who have worked with dozens of differing universal healthcare systems throughout the world come to the problem with a very different…
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AIG paid $165 million in
bonuses, but angry lawmakers and administration officials insisted the money belonged to taxpayers and vowed to get it back. The clamor over compensation overshadowed AIG's weekend disclosure that it used more than $90 billion in federal aid to pay out to foreign and domestic banks, including some that had multibillion-dollar U.S. government bailouts of their own. The counterparty list is a veritable who's who of the world's top financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs (
GS), Bank of America (
BAC), British bank Barclays (
BCS) and Germany's Deutsche Bank (
DB). The question arises - Why did the United States Government insist on honoring these legally questionable obligations?
At the heart of this transfer of billions of taxpayer dollars to the world's leading financial institutions…
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In the United States we spend more, per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world. We spent $7,421 per capita as compared to about $3,500 in countries with universal
national healthcare systems such as France and Germany. We don't receive better care in the US than the French or Germans; we just pay a lot more for it. In fact, according to the latest data, we spent $2.2 trillion in 2007 on
healthcare, or 16.2% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Even more worrisome is that expenditures continue to rise at an alarming rate of 6% annually.
Here's a radical idea: Why don't we fix the current system before the administration throws another
$634 billion federal dollars into this sinkhole? We appear to be focused…
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