A buddy of mine, Jay sent this along. I figured some of you folks might be wondering the same thing

AB:

I noticed this article on Commonwealth Fund talking about the 41% percent of working Americans who struggle with medical debt. As one those people struggling (I have special needs daughter), I can see that the current system is screwed up. Why can’t we fix it?

Jay:

The fix is insanely easy. Heck, we have two choices: Medicare for all and private insurance for all.

The first solution, medicare for all, isn’t the be all, but it is universal and it would work well enough. If you combine it with a federal mandate requiring all doctors to take Medicare without any exceptions, you have national health care built on an established framework

The reasons we don’t do it are simple, too:

1. Campaign Contributions from private industry who like the system as it is. In a nutshell, legal bribery.
2. Conservatives who against all reason fear it, or think somehow our national health would decline.
3. It’s expensive and we don’t think we afford it and our empire a the same time.

I figure it would likely cost another two trillion we don’t have and can’t tax.

Also if we tried to negotiate drug prices down for the program, it would be such a threat to the profit margins of the drug companies, they would do anything to stop it. Nothing scares drug companies more than the kind of price controls and negotiations that other nations take for granted.

Congress, of course, being on the take getting campaign contributions galore, doesn’t want to lose the lobbying money.

Also in the Conservative mindset, if lots of Americans die or go broke or die early, so what? There are always high birth-rate third world nations much worse off than us to import people from.

Now of course there is another option too. Managed care, a PPO, preferred provider organization for all. It’s very cheap - only about $450-$600 billion to cover everyone - and we could wrap Medicare and maybe the VA system into the program. It would actually save us money in the long run.

However it would mean a lot less government jobs and more oversight, something Congress doesn’t want. Those government employees all vote, after all.

And either way, if we did manage care, there would be a big fight over reproductive medicine. I can tell you that Fundamentalists in every state will howl if birth control or, heaven forbid, abortion coverage is included. The “Congress without a Spine” is in no mood for such a fight.

So instead, we get coercive half measures like Massachusetts’ buy private coverage or go to jail fascism or just nothing at all.

It’s too bad, really, but the US government is both dumb and broken on this issue.

Fixing it is doable, but we have to get new people in office. I’ll grant you, that’s not an easy task, but it is very possible, if and only if we stay on it.

Adam Benjamin Prosper was born in Colorado and now lives in Southern California. He is a blue collar guy, freelancer writer and occasional trouble maker. A. B. believes in honor, freedom, truth, justice, the environment and all that jazz. Most importantly, he believes in us the American People and our limitless capacity to make America great if we try. He blogs at http://www.abprosper.com