“It baffles me how people can lambast the administration over Katrina, Iraq, etc. and in almost the same breath insist that those same morons should be running health care.”

If we learned anything from Katrina, it was that the private sector (religious groups and charities) is better equipped to tackle social problems. The Feds will just turn it into a conduit for graft and corruption.

Healthcare will always be over-consumed and underfunded.
Healthcare, therefore, has to be rationed.
The rationing process will over-indulge some, and under-serve others.
You can ration by money (the US system) or time (delay of care or technology, as in other countries).

There is really no such thing as “everybody should have basic healthcare”, because every patient will tell you that their condition is basic healthcare, from stubbed toes to fibromyalgia to metatstatic cancer. So someone, somewhere, has to make a decision. And when the decision is made what constitutes “basic healthcare”, those who are excluded or under-served will mobilize (enter the lawyers and courts in the US) or lobby (enter the politicians) or both. Look for the decision makers (politicians and corporations in the US, politicians everywhere else) to be included in the over-indulged.

This article makes the point that politicians are the LEAST able to make decisions about health care. Yes, it sounds like chanting the mantra, but do you really want Democrats like Ted Kennedy making policy about alcohol treatment or Republicans like David Vitter handling reproductive health care? Perhaps it’s not chanting, but hard lessons learned in the tile floor section of the hospital. Healthcare is like making sausage, and we have work to do and patients to see. Leave the idealism to the carpeted section, so we can figure out how to work around them later.

While there may be no good reason to scrap the current system entirely, I worry that this is what is likely to happen since things are getting at least slowly worse, so if national health care is seen as the only other option, we’re cooked.

In theory, and probably only on some other planet, national health care could work, but it would require intelligent beings designing it, with sufficient funding to back it up. The main problem is, everyone wants it to save money compared to what we have now, and there’s no reason to expect that. How can you enroll more people and supply more health care at less cost? There is a tremendous amount of hidden cost right now in all the care that is given to people who have no coverage and no means to pay for it…it’s just written off by doctors and hospitals.

We need to start with the basics, “simply” looking at what the basic level of health care is that we want to ensure that people have access to, then try to figure out how to deliver that. But it’s going to cost money, and digging that money out of doctors’ pockets is a sad, sad mistake, and a wrong approach, unless the goal is to create a collapse of health care delivery.

And here is a chilling thought. Remember Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 90′s to change healthcare? Well, take a look at one of the outcomes of her advancement of Universal Healthcare.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9910/07/munchausen.verdict/

Now, this could happen to any politician of any party, because when it comes to politicians and medicine, we are still diluting the serum Stupid level.