To fix the health care problems, the first step is to replace a bureaucratic structure that favors lawyers and administrators with a market structure that favors patients and doctors.

Succinct!

As for the doctor shortages: It’s a simple lack of a free market. In today’s lawyer-bureaucrat structure, doctors endure incredible hassles and aren’t permitted to earn enough to make it worth it. So, due to government intervention, the demand and supply curves can’t reach equilibrium. Econ 101.

The town these obstetricians call home has a terrific need for obstetricians in private practice. Birth centers with mid-wives get a free ride compared to obstetricians and hospitals. Oh, well.

To fix the health care problems, the first step is to replace a bureaucratic structure that favors lawyers and administrators with a market structure that favors patients and doctors.

There is no other way to look at nationalized healthcare than as central planning and a central economy.

Soviet health care.

So in an 8 hour period, you learned all there is to know about health insurance and how all the companies operate? Well by damn, with that kind of thought process, I ought to be a trauma surgeon by now.

Hell, usually all it takes for liberals to become know-it-alls is a bumper sticker or a KOShole lying point.

One, the single biggest reducible cost in the medical system today is the duplicate tests — required if health care providers are to have a snowball’s chance in hell against litigators like John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, all of whom spend hours in court trying to convince people that all physicians and providers are negligent and incompetent.

Easy way to solve it: allow jury trials only for criminal malpractice, and make civil lawsuits only in front of a judge.

Two, the tax issue is a little more complicated. True, it would be nice to eliminate the corporate tax exemption and just send everyone off to purchase their own benefits, but if one has ever worked as an independent contractor, you know that all that does is increase the income tax you pay.  Furthermore, tax deductions or credits, inasmuch as they only really pay out once a year, put an unnecessary strain on household finances when you’re paying for insurance premiums year-round.

My solution? Allow employers to pay employees a fixed amount, say $500, per month to purchase health insurance — tax free. If employers choose not to do that, exempt the first $500 an employee makes each month from any form of taxation.

Really, the reason Hillary, Obama, and the rest of the Democrat Party want to nationalize health care is so that they can get their hands on the billions of dollars companies and people pay in premiums each month — and then spend that money on their leftist programs, the same way in which they do Social Security, make people wholly dependent on their government overlords, and cut benefits to pay for it.

Liberals don’t understand the concept of personal responsibility and intend to saddle the rest of us with costs. The Plymouth Colony tried Socialism. It didn’t work.

Wasn’t that the Clinton 90s when the land flowed with milk & honey and everybody (allegedly) was covered?

Yeah, yet another comment/name calling that raises political debate to an adult level.

Is it more adult to deflect attention from the reprehensible? Is it more adult to ignore those who tell people not to bother aspiring to anything greater in their lives? Seems pretty damn idiotic to me.

The U.S. is the only country in the world where people expect health benefits from their employers.  This system began in the 1940s and 1950s, when a certain, misguided corporate tax loophole kicked in and made it possible for corporations to "increase" their employees’ salaries, tax free, by paying them in company health benefits, instead of wage/salary dollars.

The hitherto-thriving private insurance market was gutted.  And, people became isolated from the real cost of medical decisions.  People walked around saying "Does my policy cover this?"  Instead of, "Do I really need this?"  The problem in America today is not that people are uninsured or under-insured; it’s that too many of them are over-insured, resulting in massive waste.

As analogy, imagine if your employer gave you "food insurance".  As you stalk the grocery aisles, you’d heap your cart with steak and lobster – as long as they’re covered under your policy.  The result would be market dysfunction and an explosion of costs.

Then Medicare came along, and let government dictate to doctors what specific services ought to cost (in the government’s supreme wisdom), while also providing a cash cow that doctors could milk if they played the bureaucratic game right, resulting in an even more distorted, inefficient medical system.  Finally, the rise of lawyers and expensive torts has further distorted the medical system and raised costs.

I saw all three of these factors at work just a few months ago, when my dad was sick.  In the end, he only had a virus.  Nothing was really wrong with him (except old age + an unusually nasty virus).  But the particular HMO bureaucracy he goes to ordered test after test after test after test after test, ultimately totalling tens of thousands of dollars, for the reasons I’ve outlined:

1) It was covered under my dad’s policy.
2) Medicare was insanely reimbursing them for all the tests.
3) They were worried about lawsuits and had to CYA.

As a result, my dad consumed – on doctor’s orders; not his fault – tens of thousands of dollars in medical care that made no difference.  That, in a nutshell, is the gross waste and inefficiency of our system today: a system where people are over-insured, providers are freaked out about lawsuits, the government merrily subsidizes all, bankrupting the country, and yet doctors can barely operate or make ends meet.

Anyway, by eliminating the crazy tax loophole that led to today’s situation, McCain’s plan would at least end the problem of people being over-insured.

But Democrats, of course, want none of these problems solved.  Democrats – and their fat-cat trial lawyer buddies – make too much money from things staying as they are, or getting even worse as further government controls and subsidies are added, aka socialized medicine.

We need to RESTORE (because we have lost it, and that’s the problem) a free-market medical system, where actors function under real cost incentives and quality and efficiency alike are rewarded.

Profits are life for organizations, too.  No profit = crappy service, followed by death (and the loss of jobs for everyone still working there).  Even so-called non-profit organizations must show net financial profits over time, or they die.

Profits-paid-by-the-consumer (as opposed to, say, government) keep the organization interested in the health and success of the consumer.  Damn straight, I want to be treated by wealthy, for-profit doctors.  But others, apparently, prefer crappy service and severe, permanent doctor shortages.

People come from Canada to the US seeking treatment, not the other way round.  So-called "free" medical care is actually slave medical care.  Doctors and patients alike are slaves to the government.  This has worked out so brilliantly for Canada that in 2005, a top court in Quebec found that Canada’s system is a basic human rights violation.