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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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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The only thing missing from current
Health Care Reform proposals is a plan to actually provide, health care. Insurance schemes both public and private, electronic medical records and legal reforms may make health care more affordable and administratively efficient but they don't answer the real question; will Americans actually receive better health care, or in many cases any health care at all?
What should be obvious, seems lost in the political rhetoric, we don't have the physicians, nurses and other health care professionals to actually provide quality universal health care despite the fact that we spend more, per capita on health care than any other country in the world. In the U.S. we spend approximately $6,000 per capita as compared to about $3,500 countries with universal
national health care
