Health Care Can Be Cured: Here's How

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Provide critically important drug information to consumers to balance the promotional hype of advertising.

Concentrate health-care spending on cost-effective areas, such as stemming the increased prevalence of diabetes in children.

Halt the existing practice by which insurers squeeze doctors through unrealistically low reimbursement rates. The same for hospitals and nursing homes that squeeze nursing salaries and staffing levels.

Reverse the costly but seldom discussed health-care trend of overdiagnosis and overtreatment something no market system will ever do. While many Americans suffer from a lack of health care, a growing number get too much.

Once the basic care package is in place, its scope could be expanded as the system realizes savings derived from standardization, more efficient computer technology and the end of market-based health-care management, with its required profits, stock options and generous executive compensation.

Individuals could supplement their basic government-supported coverage through private insurance. Wealthier citizens could continue to get whatever care they wanted and pay for it. But they would still be required to pay the earmarked taxes, just as everyone must contribute to Medicare and Social Security. Similarly, hospitals would be free to accept a certain percentage of cash-paying patients from outside the USCHC plan. As for prescription drugs, a good health-care system would strive to prescribe fewer pills, especially since the effectiveness of many drugs is questionable. The USCHC could negotiate the best possible drug prices, something that Medicare is forbidden to do by Congress.

Many Americans fear that a universal health plan would cost too much, even though the market system has already given the U.S. the world's most expensive health care. They fear the long waits they have heard about in Canada, even though comparable waiting times for tests and procedures are commonplace in many parts of the U.S. Lastly, they fear government-decreed rationing, even though health care is already rationed in the most inequitable of ways.

Despite all the fears, change will come, ultimately from two sources: working Americans who are disenchanted with ever rising costs and shrinking care, and U.S. corporations, which are increasingly refusing to pick up the added costs. They can't afford to, because America's privately funded system puts U.S. companies at a disadvantage to their competitors in the industrialized world, where health care is funded by government. GM says the cost of providing health care to its workers and retirees totals $1,400 for each vehicle sold in the U.S., more than the cost of steel.

America's health-care system is in critical condition, and we find ourselves at a turning point. We can continue to hold bake sales to finance it, or we can do what every other civilized nation on earth does take care of our citizens.