controlling costs!

Although our nation was built based on mainly independence and capitalism, when it comes to the health care it is actually wise and useful to understand and learn what other approaches exist from other nations. We already have bits of every health care system in the world in some sense. There are socialized one which the government runs the hospitals and employs the doctors (VA). And like Canada, there are private health care deliveries via health insurance companies and the government administers through a single payer system (Medicare). Finally, there are private insurance plans that everyone is required to purchase, premiums are paid through tax and the government provides subsidies for low-income citizens (MA State).

Then what is the problem? The major problem is that a large fraction of the U.S. populations are still uninsured or underinsured relatively to the amount of money we spend on the health care. Other developed nations do as well or better than U.S. system on every dimension, while costing far less money.

10 minutes is obviously not enough time to talk about such a major issue like health care reform. At some point we all need to share risk and it does not matter if you are health care providers, insurers, employers, poor or old and to prevent unequal distribution of risk, more people are actually better. I think the main issue in Obama health care reform deals with the controlling costs. Our fragmented system seems to favor supply side of the market and people are paying much higher prices due to this shortage of affordable supply. Therefore we need to find ways to control costs of supply more effectively.