Healthcare Rant
First off I’ll leave the links up top, because this is probably going to get long.
Thers of Whiskey Fire responds to a Crooked Timber post, The Heavy Burden of Level-Headedness which responds to a Christopher Caldwell criticism of Michael Moore and the movie SiCKO.
Then R. Neal at Facing South reports in SiCKO: What now? Answer: HR676?, of the efforts of John Conyers to expand Medicare coverage to everyone in HR 676 that he introduced in the 109th Congress.
Thers is wrong in assuming that people know about the American healthcare system. What they know is the system that directly affects them and those they love. There is no American healthcare system.
Medicare and the military Tricare are the only systems that work in the same way all over the U.S. There is a different system in every state for Medicaid, and every other program varies widely not simply from state to state, but often within a state, i.e. different coverage in rural areas than urban areas.
This lack of standards or standardization is the source of a great deal of waste in the system and drives the costs up unnecessarily.
July 11, 2007 3 Comments
