All for car recovery

Before you buy in to the arguments that we need a government-run healthcare system, consider: The health sector is roughly 16 percent of the American economy, and rising. The Medicare and Medicaid programs alone represent 23 percent of the federal budget (far more than defense), are growing, and consistently outpace inflation. Medicare’s unfunded liabilities alone are a breathtaking $89 trillion (that’s not a typo, folks) and is expected to go broke within a decade (Social Security will go broke about five years after that). The current national debt is $546,668 per household. Congress is presently working on healthcare reform legislation, so there is no specific bill to discuss. The politics change with every news cycle – and sometimes within a news cycle. Senator Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee, has circulated a draft of a draft bill. The Congressional Budget Office scores, or estimates the cost, at approximately $1.6 trillion over 10 years, and that’s for starters. You can add that to the numbers above. Oh, and this $1.6 trillion will only cover 16 million of the 46 million currently not covered by health insurance. Most of us have insurance through our employers, which is a buyer-seller-receiver healthcare model that distrusts the free market and limits an individual’s choice. We have a third-party payment system that is inefficient, confusing and paper-based, which invites fraud (a bureaucratic, paper-based system cannot keep up with fraud perpetrated through computer systems). All of this will be magnified in a government-run system. In a government-run buyer-seller-receiver model, the buyer (government) gets nothing of direct value, so seeks to pay as little as possible and micromanages and second-guesses the seller (healthcare provider). The seller is beset with the feeling that the buyer suspects him of incompetence, greed or fraud – or all of them. The receiver...

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