From pillar to post - Why is our health care so aimless?

If any of you have not experienced why our health care is in such a mess, look no further than a call about 18:00 on any night about something you are not sure is a medical emergency. Wait to be transferred to four or five people, each with questions in order to make the process acceptable to the physician involved.

Keep about four or five people and yourself occupied for an hour or more answering the same questions with each of these people. Find out about our protected physicians and the absurd system that protects them. Finally, get to the physician who asks two questions and gives you the advice in under a minute, with most effort to avoid any explanation and understanding.

Welcome to Health Care USA. There is nothing in any bill that addresses this ridiculous dance to the health care clock. One that goes interminably slow, makes you feel like a meaningless cog in a never-ending wheel, and creates a system that lacks sympathy, empathy or for that matter any understanding of medicine or science.

"Take two aspirins and call me in the morning." This is no joke. For nearly a hundred years this standard statement for almost everything (now substitute an aspirin substitute) has been about the only advice anyone can get, over the phone or otherwise. This remains the situation today for most. Otherwise, you get the dreaded: "Go to the emergency room if you think you are seriously ill."

The health care systems in most of the world are not nearly as inefficient as this. Do not listen to the propaganda put out by everyone without focus on efficiency. And do not try to tell the insurance companies that it is their fault, even though their reimbursement systems promote seeing more people in repetitive payment settings for the same patient on the same day.

The root cause of this problem is special interests, but they are not doing so intentionally. Politicians are almost to a person special interests or acting in the interests of special interests.

No the root cause here is total absence of any leadership. Obama seems to feel that no leadership is better than any, perhaps trying to act like the anti-Bush. For anything that is government, blame is due not because we have special interests, or because government is involved, it is due for the total absence of leadership.

As to special interests, do not believe that you really understand their positions, which remain hidden. If they all operate correctly, the full picture will unfold anyway.

For all, no legislative act on the horizon will spell efficiency. The politicians involved are just too plain dumb (in both senses of the word) to allow efficiency to come into our system, although they sure will give it lip service.

For all those who claim we have a free market system of health care in this country, I have a great bridge to sell you.

We have no such thing as a free market in health care, and have not had any such thing for more than a century. What we have is an FTC, FDA, trade, treaty, etc., highly regulated part of commerce. Nixon became a central government promoter in the health care field, for his national health planning acts. We have never looked back since at the local level. The Republicans ended competition at the local level, one of the most stupid things ever done, and we have never looked back.

Of course, much regulation is very good, and we all know this. People have taken money from others for cures based on using sound, bringing huge speakers into one's home to undertake this "cure." A whole raft of other horrible and useless cures have been foisted on the public over the past more than hundred years even with state and federal regulations. Imagine where we could be today without at least this level of help.

On the other hand, any admission that government regulation is required is a march into the other side's territory for Republicans. So we have lies, half-truths, and other nefarious statements designed to promote the side in favor of a "free market."

It is not government's fault that we have no efficiency in the system. But it will be. Once Obama and his crew finish with their "health care" bill, no one will be able to feel the consequences as to which the monetary payments are the most slight, inconsequential of all. Because we will see even greater red tape, the "free market" crowd will say this is proof of the failure. In fact, proof of the failure is the continuing silliness of treating single payer as if it is really the demise of medicine instead of the right answer.

I for one will not be satisfied until we do not have "competition" of the kind with health care. Either we open the system up to complete competition (with appropriate criminal and civil limitations on fraud), or we treat reality as it exists today - a regulated market in which there is little or no competition that begs for a total government-based solution.