Cutting costs should begin with educated Americans choosing to obey reality and die when their time comes. Hospice is great for that, and so are advance directives.
How much money goes to terminal and permanently unconscious patients' care- care of which they are personally unaware ?
This gets covered by Medicare and Medicaid, and certainly makes up a big chunk of medical billing.
Why are these Christian freaks so afraid of meeting their maker?

NO HEALTH CARE-   NOW!!!!
At the risk of oversimplifying, healthcare reform got Obama and the Democrats elected in force. The other issue is imaginary. Getting all the attention is the noisy "NO" from the status quo party. Once upon a time we were agreed that the rampant bloat in medical-industry billing had to be checked or we were all going to go broke. Then there was the wave of employer-sponsored plans being cut back, now funded more by the consumer every day.

Thus, the noise machine known as the RNC is the root of all evil at this moment. Obama won, and they are marginal. But they want their way- whatever that is, and their way suffers dramatically if Democrats are seen succeeding- no matter what. Now they want a weakened presidency. They want gubmint hands off their Medicare. They are bad, and I don't think anybody can succinctly present 'their way' in any other terms. 

I'm ready to steamroll them. Get a skeleton medical reform plan passed- just a little corporation to cover the millions of uninsured. We've seen the math, the plan as is could be paid for by the to-be-covered (very poor could pay $150/month and the not-so-poor could pay $450/month) and paid for in this ten-year period we're warned will cost a Trillion Dollars. Hardball it and make it fit into the currently abominable non-system we have now. Keep your plan, or die without care if you wish. 30 or 40 million Americans would be needed as volunteers to test it. I volunteer, because I want my daughter and son to focus on their work and skills instead of looking over their shoulders at aging.

RNC 'plans' were based on TORT reform, limiting the right of a human to get relief after injury where doctors or insurers were responsible. Now malpractice payouts are down dramatically, by 20% since 2002 by my reading, but health insurance premiums are still skyrocketing. Insurance providers are getting bonus and commission and salary and medical benefits. All that growth is good for the Insurance lobby, but bad for the economy. It's still good for the RNC, because they rely so heavily on malinformed and poorly reasoned Americans to keep them in office to receive government checks and health insurance. These dopes get agitated more easily, and can be sent to shout down the dialog. They cling to guns and religion- but not to butter.

I've been paying cash for doctor visits and crossing my fingers I get my heart attack after age 50. It's not as bad as one may expect, and for medicine to work in a culture we have to have a doctor. There must be a relationship with someone who checks out your ticker and has notes on you. Increased specialization hurts the consumer in this economy.

Care is rationed like any other good in our country, but education is free. It's also pathetic on balance, but every kid is exposed (by the government) to the food pyramid in school. Then the kid goes home to eat the garbage their parents eat, smoke what they smoke, bathe in herbicides and flame retardant and eventually get sick. Usually it's diabetes because they preferentially consume empty calories. So the government is already charged with trying to influence you to make responsible health choices- and you fail.

I think I can tie this whole thing together by saying it's not fit for politics. Politics is fighting to get your way. I refuse to believe there are people who want to be left to fend for themselves against mortality, when so many of us are equally mortal and vulnerable to the same risks.


When it turns out to be mild, and non-cataclysmic, Democrats get a bigger majority and the ossified asses of the right wing will need to batch together the other fringe units to appear relevant.
Finally, hospice is better than vegetative decay sustained to continue billing, and a Christian party should know better than to cheat God.

Sometimes a story has legs. Sometimes the story is incomprehensible, or just won't fit into 30 minutes with the CA wildfires, homosexuals and other slightly distracting but colorful filler, and personal grandstanding by networks' designated grey bears along with sufficient background to treat it as a reporter is programmed to treat stories.
But sometimes the legs happen because the channels are tired of presenting information and more interested in sharing a story. They want conflict, even when there is none. For example, there is nothing in health care reform legislation being discussed. It's a thousand pages- try to publish it somewhere. Nobody even knows what's in it, aside from the status quo protections leveraged by the insurance lobby. Just look at the Swift Boat bullshit, the march to war, global warming.
So what gets covered is the itsy-bitsy Republican (NO) minority's inability to stop it. Somehow they have to make us not want a reform of the health industry. "Get your gubmint hands off my Medicare" should have dominated the news hours:"What are these people thinking Sally? I'm only fifty, but I know Medicare is government program. Is someone telling these freaks that Medicare just happened, or that it came from God on the 8th day?"
I don't want to see the fringe discarded. It's important to have crackpots. All these anchors went to college, albeit to study communications and haircuts. Shameful.

Maybe the infamous Boston Tea Party was also a hoax. Maybe the tea industry whipped people into a frenzy with charges that the crown was plotting to continue to tax tea until the colonies were stuffed with sleepy people with tolerable breath. Tea was going to be prohibitively expensive, so they threw it into Boston Harbor.

Fast forward 200 years, and the status quo industry (RNC+FOX+Insurance rackets and that's all) is trying to gather up all the health care and throw it into the water.

If I can't have it, then nobody will. And if I already have it, then fuck you all. And if I think my employer-tied health insurance is going to keep my family secure against life and its constant companion aging, even while we KNOW We KNOW we know WE KNOW employers are moving away from sponsoring employee benefits (you weren't here for the meeting known as the '80s, when everything we believed was replaced by wanton materialism and corporate impugnity?), then you better not be asking me about whether I want anything spared in the preservation of my incredibly important and intellectually impoverished ass.