Boy, as a cynic with decades of reasons to be one, I can hardly wait for the discovery of all the neat little features that will be in any Health Care Improvement And Reform For All Americans Act bill that finally is excreted from The World's Greatest Deliberative Body.
One of the things I'm waiting for, hidden in the final bill, that apparently no one but industry lobbyists will get to actually read before it's passed like a silent breaking of wind in a crowded theater, is the section that revises the US bankruptcy code to make non-dischargeable the medical debts that the present "insurance" system crushes people with. Like the credit card companies were able to do a decade or so ago with the consumer debt they helped sucker the public into amassing.
I speak as a nurse who sees the crap that passes for "medical care" in America every day. I hope we ordinary taxpayers without the health coverage our leaders have provided for themselves can survive the sequelae that will attend our latest trip through the legislative sausage maker.
Interesting that the entrepreneurial class of self-employed innovators and contract workers takes the hugest hit under the present system. They either can't get or can't afford health insurance, so they fly along without a net until they crash from some originally minor problem that Golden Rule-type health care could have fixed early. How many geese can we kill before the kleptocrats have no more Golden Eggs to steal?
And while I’m at it, also interesting that the "privatized-medicine" Shi-ites that howl about the evils of "socialized medicine," especially the so-called "insurance companies," are lining up to FORCE policy-holders to travel to "government-run single payer 'rationed care' incompetent professionals" places like Thailand or China or Uruguay. To get surgeries and other treatments that are ten times as expensive in the US. And gee, the US premiums will be based on US costs for the service, and guess who will pocket the difference? They are calling it "medical tourism," to bury its real nature behind the actual voluntary migration of US citizens to those countries for care that is uninsured and unavailable at home, or those tummy tucks and blepharoplasties that are best done with a recuperation period out of the spotlight while the bruising subsides.
And, I have to ask, which US doctors, in this litigious nation, are going to pick up the post-treatment/surgical care of someone treated/cut on by a foreign doctor?
At least it appears a lot less likely that the migrant wellness-seekers will pick up an incurable infection in those "evil socialized medicine" hospitals. Where the staff cares more about staph, and is populous and kind enough, in their freedom from profit-driven do-more-with-less "cost cutting," to provide actual CARE.