Another Argument for American Single-Payer Healthcare

What we are doing now is broke and expensive. I highlighted this line in the paragraphs below, but I want to also point it out here:

"Since government regulation of prices and services is not in the cards, the inevitable result is higher costs."

Until we allow the government to step into the ring and negotiate some of these costs, we are stuck on this train. Government intervention works for the VA, it works in the Canadian drugs that are purchased daily. It can work for our healthcare. Let's make the providers, HMO's and insurers compete with the government in price and service.

Rising health care costs, already threatening many basic industries, now consume 16 percent of the nation's economic output -- the highest proportion ever, the government said yesterday in its latest calculation.

The nation's health care bill continued to grow substantially faster than inflation and wages, increasing by almost 8 percent in 2004, the most recent year with near-final numbers.

Even as health care costs continue to escalate, however, many Americans -- especially minorities and the poor -- still do not receive high-quality care, according to two other federal reports yesterday. The quality of health care is improving slowly and some racial disparities are narrowing, the reports found, but gaps persist and Hispanics appear to be falling even further behind.

The overall cost of health care -- everything from hospital and doctor bills to the cost of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, insurance and nursing home and home-health care -- doubled from 1993 to 2004, said the report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In 2004, the nation spent almost $140 billion more for health care than the year before.

"Americans rejected the tougher restrictions of managed care in the late 1990s, and yet they want all the latest advances in medical technology," said Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which researches health issues. "Since government regulation of prices and services is not in the cards, the inevitable result is higher costs."

The health care increase of 7.9 percent in 2004 was almost three times the overall national inflation rate, which was 2.7 percent. The average hourly wage for workers in private companies was essentially unchanged that year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.