DALE WEIGHS IN ON MY QUESTION

ON my question (see below) about Health Insurance, this is what my friend Dale Andrews has to say:

"I wrote a paper on this in a doctoral program at Texas Tech twenty years ago. It is all very simple: we have developed the worse conglomeration of special medical, political, and industrial, pharmacological, and legal monster systems possible under a mildly socialistic umbrella - the worst of all worlds. We have had it so long that we protect it. If we fixed it, millions of paper pushers would be out of work - many of them governmental. My paper showed one thing: we can have a single pay system that is affordable, that everyone pays into, and that is state of the art. To get there, we have to get the lawyers, politicians, and other special manipulative interests out of it. In short, we will have to, as a country, focus on medicine and not self-interests. I predicted that it would take 25 years for the system to collapse so that we would do this seriously and do it right. The bill introduced last year was beyond farce. It added 120 new gov. bureaucracies and began to push nearly half of the doctors we now have away from medicine completely. The money is there, but the insurance industry will have to be dissolved...and you KNOW that is not going to happen. The gov. will have to be a disciplined administrator, and you KNOW that is not going to happen. The same thing goes for all of the other parties involved. THE MONEY IS THERE but it has to be collected across the boards and it cannot go into the pockets of non-medical entities (gov. admin., lawyers, etc.).

Here is the good news: There are countries with successful forms of socialized medicine that do very well with their system. The one thing they all have in common is that their system focuses on medicine not politics. I cheered when Hilary Clinton came out with a plan. ALL special interests - including political on both sides of the aisle - did their part in killing it. The bottom line is: the system is not in enough pain yet to truly create a working model. I doubt seriously that I will ever live to see a working model in this country. We are all going to be killed by greed in one form or another over this. Bureaucracy is not medicine.

Gads!!! What a mess!!!