This article gives a distorted image and claims the solutions to health care costs are too complicated for a single piece of legislation. Nothing could be further from the truth. As long as the focus remains on giving insurers with excessive bureaucracy the center for competition this problem will continue to fester. People choose providers in the main, not a particular insurance. That is usually determined by one's employer for 70% of people. However this large chunk of the population only expends 34% of the payment for services. If insurance was working properly it would cover almost 100% of the cost. This has happened because insurers cherry pick healthier populations and leave the care bill to government in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, military clinics, or out of pocket. The real competition for services should be at the level of providers and presently this does not exist as it should. So even if less services are used during hard times those who deliver treatments remain the same and the costs remain the same or rise. I am sure the latest increases for medical outlays will outstrip inflation, regardless of what the economy is doing.

There are several different items which are being conflated in this conversation. Any reference to a yearly rise or fall in health care costs is a referencing a macro-level statistic which is influenced by a myriad of factors, not the least of which is demographics, and an aging population. Care needs to be taken in interpreting that type of data. Discussions about quality measurements in health care are fundamentally flawed. While it is true that one provider may be more capable than another provider, the ultimate outcome of any treatment is an interaction between patient and provider. Sometimes the best providers are working with the most intransigent cases. In the insurance scheme of tiering, this gives the good provider a lower score. What does this accomplish? Tiering is an idea which has so many conceptual and pragmatic flaws that it should be immediately abandoned. Your doctor is right, Steven. The health care world simply does not behave in the same way as a market which sells people a discretionary commodity, or even a necessary item.

I wonder what would happen if health insurance premiums paid for by an employers were 1) not mandatory and 2) taxed as the income they really are. I suspect the average worker, not seeing the money paid for by the employer as a portion of his earnings disassociates himself from the idea that if the employer wasn't paying high health premiums he would have a bigger take home check. Workers think the benefit is free. It is not. It's only then that we would have a true market driven health care system and could see what happens. Never going to happen but I just wonder what would happen if....

Once all people residing in our country are all covered by a National Health Plan (except for politicians). The cadre of medical regulators (good paying government jobs)are containment personal and the right to die is its new tool.