I'm one of the 50 or so estimated Americans that doesn’t have health insurance. I don't mean just poor health insurance. I mean I have nothing. I haven't had health insurance in about 10 years, and it's not by choice. If anything medically serious were to happen to me I would most likely be in bankruptcy my entire life if not worse. I would also cost society a lot more at that point. I stay in great shape but someday if do to nothing more than age, or an unforeseen accident or medical condition I will need healthcare. I even had a scare a few months ago that luckily turned out to be nothing, but I couldn't go get it checked out like I wanted to. My family has a history of cancer among other things on top of it. None of that is even accounting for the fact that I have been able to get my eyes or teeth checked in that time either other than to just have some teeth pulled completely out because I couldn't afford anything else.
The people that don't want government run health insurance have never come up with a reasonable solution for people like me other than some of them that will admit that people like me should just be thrown to the wolves because it would inconvenience them. Considering I think having the government give you as reasonable healthcare as it can is a human right, what were doing right now isn't working. Treating healthcare as a business or a function of the market is stupid. It can never be treated as a normal business. The free market system has failed. It's failure is blatantly obvious at this point.
What also needs to be remembered is that as expensive as health care is getting more and more people will be left without it either literally or in a practical sense. Then you have to add in all the people that technically have health care but it's so poor or inadequate it might as well not exist for them. The way it's currently going is unsustainable. That's what has happened for letting market forces dictate healthcare. It also drags down other business that have to help flip the bill for it because at some time we got the stupid idea in our heads that it was a good thing to get health care though our employers. All the technological advances or great care we can give don't mean shit if more and more people continually can't receive it. It's better to have adequate care for everybody than great care for a few and the rest get screwed.
If anything, all proposals that have been suggested are inadequate. It's just a bunch of play baby half-assed measures that probably won't work that good and will prolong the inadequacies of the system while the people that might loose a profit from it fight it as much as possible. The government just needs to socialize everything about medicine. If that means taking over hospitals, drug manufactures, laboratories, research facilities, medical branches of places of higher learning, making all medical doctors employees of the government, and strictly regulating cost and regulating everything about it short of things like unneeded elective plastic surgery then so be it. Whatever it takes to get reasonable health care to as many people as possible and constrain the cost of it as much as reasonably possible. Maybe if anything they can let insurance companies continue to exist only provide people with insurance for very very exceptional or unneeded treatment if they so choose to pay them for it.
While I don't trust the government to run things efficiently or to always do what's in the best interest of society, I trust businesses, especially businesses in the medical industry a lot less.
