National Healthcare: Why Another Trillion Dollars? Something Doesn't Add Up!

• Fact: No one in this nation can be refused healthcare at any one of our hospitals. It is the law and it the reason why most of our hospital emergency rooms are clogged with colds, flu, and broken arms that need medical care but would have been better treated --- at an extremely lower cost --- by a family practitioner or at some clinic.
  
• Fact: In a country of 300 million people, about 16 percent of our population -- 46 million people -- don't have medical/healthcare insurance.
• Fact: The cost to cover the medical cost of the uninsured is already in the healthcare system. That is why the majority of hospitals, clinics, and doctors remain profitable. The majority of the uninsured's expenses are being picked up the medically "insured" of this country in their own family insurance programs (See Full Story). The remainder of the costs are covered by our Federal government and by the individual states in various assistance programs; by out of pocket expenses; and, by charitable organizations.

Just focusing on the fact that uninsured healthcare costs are already being absorbed by the "system" in various fashions and assuming that Obama is claiming that he will reduce healthcare costs in America; then, why is Obama asking for $634 billion over the next decade (See Full Story) as a down payment on his Nationalized Health Care system. Some experts actually expect that cost to be double that number because of government waste and fraud that will result in higher costs for nationalized heath care.

However, any of this additional expense makes absolutely no sense. If the costs already are in the system and Obama is promising to reduce healthcare expenses across the board, the cost of a nationalized healthcare system should be, in theory and at the very worst, a zero-sum game. This is especially true if you assume that a lot of uninsured medical care is being doled out at emergency room rates; and those rates can be as much as 10 times the cost of a normal doctor's office or clinic visit.

As I have vehemently stressed before in this blog, the elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring when it comes to health care is litigation (See my May 17 blog entry). Beyond this, we need to get people out of the hospital emergency rooms and into less expensive care. Maybe state or federally supported clinics might do the trick? But, the bottom line is that health care is already 16% of our Gross Domestic Product and Obama wants to up that ante with billions of dollars more in federal expense. Does that sound like a cost savings to you? All the money we need for national health care is already out there. We just need to find a way to better utilize it. This means that some thought must go into the formulation of a national health care system for America... It must be outside the political arena and not involve the Federal government and all the waste that usually goes along with that type of program. As a country, we should not be rushing, as with the stimulus program that still has yet to be spent, to just spend money and to get "any" nationalized healthcare system, good or bad, because it was this President's campaign promise! Let's get all the healthcare service suppliers and the government together to put a real plan together that doesn't have all the pitfalls of those in Canada and Europe. For once, can we use the best and brightest and not the dumbest and dimmest of Washington, D.C. to decide the fate of America!