Health Care

The big issue today is health care. Should we have universal health care? If so, how do we do that? How do we pay for it? Do we want a system that is like Canada, Great Britain, or any of the other nations that have a socialized medical care system? How do we know what is best? Perhaps most important of all, who will pay for it, and how?

I, for one, would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the way different health systems work. Maybe compare our system with Finland's, Canada's and Switzerland's, or pick any three modern nations. All we hear is that we will not get the same quality of care if we change, that we will have to wait a long time for the care we do get, and that someone other than ourselves will be in charge of the care we receive. We are already putting up with these things -- when was the last time you had to visit an emergency room?

These claims leave me feeling pretty skeptical, especially when most of them are coming from insurance companies who are making obscene amounts of money off the system as it now exists. I don't believe we have a monopoly on good doctors, or researchers, or medicines. I do think that our infant mortality rate is too high (higher than several other western nations), and we do not live as long, on average, as citizens of some other countries. Maybe health care should be the responsibility of localities, like education once was. I don't claim to know how to fix the system that we now have, or even if we should fix it. Maybe we should discard it and start all over. I do know that too many people don't have health care, and that too many people are paying too much for the health care they do receive. In a country as great as ours, this is intolerable.