It's Time: 80% Want Overhaul of U.S. Health Care

Yes, over 80% of Americans now agree: the U.S. health care system needs to be completely rebuilt or requires fundamental change. That's what a recent Harris International poll found. And that's true regardless of income and insurance status: 81% of those who were insured for the prior year and 89% who were uninsured called for either fundamental change or complete rebuilding. Only 16% of adults said the health care system works relatively well and needed only minor reform.

But how can that be, you ask? Isn't ours the great, market-driven health care system, the international standard-setter? Well, let's see:

• At least 47 million Americans do not have health insurance at all (as of 2005).

• Inefficiencies and rising costs have resulted in over a 100 percent increase in health premiums for private sector employers and their workers in just over a decade. The average premium for a family insurance plan rose to $11,381 in 2006, from $4,954 in 1996, while the average cost for a single premium rose to $4,118 from $1,992;

• Americans spend double what people in other industrialized countries do on health care: $6,697 per capita on health care in 2005, or 16 percent of gross domestic product, compared to $3,326 in Canada, or 9.8 percent of GDP.

• And, contrary to the propaganda of our health care industry, Americans often have more trouble seeing doctors, and are the victims of more errors and go without treatment more often than people in other industrialized countries.

I'd say it's time, wouldn't you? I'd say 80% of American voices should be heard, wouldn't you?

There are some national social services that are considered by modern civilized societies to be the rights of all citizens--and also in the best interest of a robust and growing economic system. As such, they must be administered fairly and equally to all people. This is not something that markets do. Markets develop and provide the very best to those with the most money through those incentivized by profit to provide the best, most expensive products and services. People with less money can afford only lesser products and services. People with little or no money can afford none.

We Americans all recognize this with respect to education and subsistence retirement incomes. They are administered by the government for the equal benefit of all--but supplemented by private market products for those who wish to get more and pay more for it. The combined national and private systems work relatively well. Everyone wins.

But the rest of the industrialized, civilized world also recognize that health care, and certainly basic, preventative health care, must also be provided to all in the same fair and equal way. It is not only what a civilized country should guarantee to its people, it is absolutely necessary to provide healthy and well-educated workers for a modern workforce and well-functioning economy.

But not our United States government. Or, I should say, not our government as influenced primarily by lobbyists for the enormous private healthcare industry in the U.S.: Big Pharma (the big pharmaceutical companies), big high-tech healthcare products manufacturers and, of course, big healthcare providers (hospitals and their doctors). They are the principal architects and beneficiaries of this unequal, inefficient, uncontrollable brier patch of a health care system that the market's "invisible hand" has wrought. They've patched it together based primarily on their own interests and reward, not on delivering effective health care for all people. That's the way markets work, after all. That's what we thought we wanted. But the context and nature of their roles must now evolve. The needs of our country and our people have changed.

It's time. It's just time.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26077335/