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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Archie Meeties who wrote (8469)	8/20/2009 12:43:07 AM
From: i-node	4 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

Alcohol related injuries are among the top 5 cause of morbidity and mortality in the country and by extension, huge burdens on the health care system. You don't have to tell me. My brother was killed by a drunk driver and I'm sure the hospital bill for that 15 minutes they spent trying to revive him was unimaginable. Our de facto system way of addressing this is to ignore it. Why? Health insurance does not incentivize or even compensate nurses/physicians for doing preventative work. Insurance companies pay for procedures first, treatment second and sometimes begrudgingly, and public health measures almost not at all. But providers can preach to alcohol and drug addicted individuals from now on and it won't even slow them down. Nobody denies that alcohol kills people. But it just isn't something the public health system has much control over. If you want to stop these behaviors you are going to need something else. One day, there may be an implantable device that controls such behavior. But if you eliminate profits in the health care system it is going to be a very long time indeed. One could make the argument that over eating is an epidemic, gambling, various high-risk sexual behaviors, smoking, riding motorcycles and 4-wheelers, even driving. If you wanted to extend epidemiology to anything that can kill someone. But realistically, these are not problems the public health system can do much about, and in some cases, that it should even TRY to do anything about. It doesn't contribute to the conversation to confuse the argument with a lot of largely irrelevant material. The problem is big enough as it is. To solve a problem of this magnitude you have to chip away at the edges, learning as you go, and ramp up over an extended period. You can't just discard 1/6 of our economy, that works better than any other health care system in the world and say, "We're starting over". Sorry, that just isn't the way you solve big problems.