Health Care in the US, or rather lack thereof.

Now, I am going to go a bit out of my typical post.  I haven’t posted in a while, so I figure, what the hell.

I just finished watching Michael Moore’s new film SiCKO and it has brought up some interesting points. Now I know you are crawling in your seat “Michael Moore is very unreliable, and slants the truth” and I want you to know that I took the data information he gave, with a grain of salt.  However it brings up a very interesting idea.  The US can and should have a universal health care system for everyone. Some of the downfalls mentioned are that it will take 6 months to get a surgery that isn’t considered life threatening, just the condition hurts a lot, so you are put on a waiting list. Now I ask you, does it not make more sense to wait 6 months with an agonizing, but non life threatening condition than to have to live with the condition for the rest of your life because you will NEVER be able to afford the cost of the surgery? Obviously, it makes much more sense. One candidate for president, Barack Obama has said that he is for Universal Insurance, which is the next best thing to universal health care.  With a universal insurance system, everyone has at least the minimum insurance, that will pay for life threatening and severely debilitating conditions.  If you choose to go with an insurance company, you have the option to get more coverage, and get exclusively private doctors, which is a plus.  Another benefit of a universal insurance/health care system is that it provides competition with the major insurance companies, which would lead to lower premiums, better and wider coverage, as well as cheaper plans. Some of you are saying that it will cost a fortune and that we will never have the funding for such a thing.  Well Lets just look at how much over the past several years that the Iraq War is costing us.  To date over $450 BILLION or $450,000,000,000 has been spent on the Iraq war, and estimates put the final cost at well over $1 Trillion ($1,000,000,000,000). We could have taken that amount and started a Universal Health Care system that would provide nearly $700 every year for 5 years for every single man, woman, and child in the US.  You might be saying that $700 is not much, but if you applied that to say 2/3s of the population, assuming that the other 1/3 would have private insurance, you get around $1000 per person per year.  That may not sound like much, but when you look at the amount that doctors and nurses make, if we were to freeze the salaries of the top 10% of the highest paid nurses and doctors around the country, we could save a substantial amount.  Some people have mentioned that socialized health care or insurance wouldnt work because the government would be in charge of it, and it would be a very bumpy process of setting the system up, I ask you…  Why does Canada, Great Britain, Cuba, France, and other modern, and third world countries  around the globe have a healthy public health system.  The government is involved with many other public systems, from electricity, sewer and water systems, to your mail, and emergency responders like fire, EMS, and police.  Why cant they be involved in health care. After all, when you call the government funded 911, cause you are sick, and a government funded sheriff or police shows up, ensures your safety, and calls for the government funded EMS, EMS shows up and takes you to a local public hospital that is also government funded. The biggest kink in the system is payment, and when hospitals (i.e. the government) is concerned about being paid by you or the insurance company, they must drag you through a long list of questions and such.  If the government took part or most of the bill themselves, they wouldn’t have to ask you who your insurance company is, or how much money you make, and judge by that whether or not they give you treatment.  Yes, by law it is required that emergency care be given to those that need it, however the government should be helping prevent citizens from needing to go to the point of nearly falling over dead, walking into the emergency room, receive care, then need to be concerned that they are not going to be able to pay for the care they receive.  If I were a poor citizen and I got sick, went to the ER with a life threatening condition, was stabilized and released, then hassled about my payments for the care I receive, the next time I become ill, I am not going to go to the ER cause they will do nothing but revive me, then ask me to pay up.  It would be a continuous circle of running my finances into the ground. There is no room for such blatant ignorance in the US.  The government should step up and do something about the lack of health care in the US.   I believe that right now, nothing is being done because the doctors, nurses, pharmacists and mainly the pharmaceutical companies all want their cut from the enormous pie that we call health care.