Thanks for a well-written and thoughtful post. I’m a public employee with a very sweet deal, but my mother, who had a heart attack a few weeks ago and got some substandard care that kept her in the ICU a few extra days has a sub-optimal plan and so is facing some very difficult times financially. I’m not trying to play polyanna and deny there are problems and I really do admire your work in business and desire to create jobs. Part of what alarms me however is the all but infantile discussion of reform that is taking place at the highest levels of government and the unseemly rush to get this done quick in order to serve one party’s political interest. Also, being in Poland and seeing what state-funded health care looks like, and having utterly liberal, dyed in the pink hair-shirt America-haters colleague whose husband’s illness led her to flee a much wealthier England’s health care because they are convinced that it will kill him, all makes me quite concerned about the recklessness of a public option that likely will undermine private health care without producing better care.

And it’s not just the insurance companies that Congress is kow-towing to, at least not in this Congress. The major unions still have a vested interest in maintaining their current health care plans, and tort reform is nowhere to be seen. Until there is courage enough to tackle the unions and the trial lobby, medical costs will continue to be driven by non-market forces, and the broader economy – like your contribution, and that of those workers you otherwise could employ – will suffer.

We’re rewarding bad behavior at every level.

https://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2009&month=09

Of course their always is the option the country default on its obligations or inflates the currency to eliminate the bill but not even the most starry eyed Congress scoundrel will admit that is their intent.

David,

In the broadest of terms, one way or another, we all pay for health care. I happen to pay for mine with private insurance. Others pay for theirs with taxes or receive it as compensation. On the whole, the system is fraught with waste, fraud, inefficiency and abuse. It is overly complicated and leaves a lot of people exposed.

Is health care in this country a constitutional right? No, I don’t think it is. However, the low form of extortion and black mail practiced by the health insurance companies ought to be illegal. The practice of billing uninsured five and six times the cost for a procedure is predatory.

Most people in this country belong to the private sector, we are on our own and have very little choice or options, especially those with kids. What parent is going to deny their sick children medicine, no matter what the cost.

I would say the the current brokenness is very expensive. I can not grow my business because I can’t afford to pay decent wages and provide health insurance (I can do one or the other, not both). Most personal bankruptcies in this country are due to medical expenses. Hospitals absorb the losses by billing everyone else extra. The sick get sicker and become a burden on the system, their communities, and their families. If an uninsured person has a major illness, it can wipe out a families means for a generation or more.

What is needed is insurance reform, but no congressman is going to touch that because the insurance industry owns congress.