kingrat

I don't have a full policy prescription for fixing our health care system. Some bullet points on what I do think though:

• we're addicted as a country to drugs that don't do all that much good and cost a lot of money due to patent monopolies and clever promotion
• we have far less tolerance for the medical profession getting things wrong than other countries
• the incentives behind our private insurance system (healthy people have no incentive to get insurance, and insurance companies have no incentive to insure sick people) mean it won't work as is, nor will it with minor tweaking.
• our export/import policy puts lower income workers like steelworkers and janitors in competition with foreign labor, but protects higher income workers like doctors from foreign competition, increasing the costs of consumers of medical services.
• We make a lot of bad health care choices culturally (eating too much, getting too little physical activity, smoking, etc.) while still expecting the health care system to maintain us like it could if we didn't make those choices.

I'm sure there are more things I can think of. I don't know what the right combination of policy prescriptions is to fix them. And I don't know what the right combination of items fixed will actually change things. All I do know is that we'll need to nationalize some parts of health care in order to fixed it. Either that or make some really creative changes to the system to change the current incentives.