Before the govt gets into healthcare(indeed if they do at all!), the price increases we see year after year need to be addressed. It would be disastrous to implement a universal healtcahre system for all without doing so.
The government is already into health care big time via Medicare. No reason why Medicare can't be extended to cover all Americans. The result will be a US that spends a lot less on health care, gets much better health care on the average, and eliminates the huge wasteful overhead of administering the current system, a system that, by some estimates, spends 40 cents on the dollar on overhead, roughly ten times what countries with nationalized systems spend.
The experience in the US compared to countries with nationalized health care systems has proven beyond reasonable doubt, IMO, that a market-based health care system is unworkable and far more expensive than a nationalized system. Markets simply don't work when human lives are at stake. The result is that we still take care of everybody, but we are doing it when their illnesses have reached such a critical stage, that they are far more expensive to treat -- or, even better, prevent.
As for Dean, I like the guy for a somewhat strange reason: he is a doctor. We need all the non-lawyer politicians we can get.
Dean is no flaming liberal. His fiscal management of Vermont was a model of conservatism. He will have no trouble pointing that out and contrasting it with the gargantuan deficits Bush is bestowing on the next generation.
I suspect Dean knows what a great deal a nationalized health care system will be for the US. A nationalized health care system will be a great boon to US competitiveness and productivity. Just the elimination of the enormous amounts of time, money, and effort we spend administering the current hodgepodge would be wonderful. The elimination of the crazy quilt of individual employer plans would greatly boost the competitiveness of US businesses. The bottom line will be considerable savings for the US economy.
Kyros |
