There's an insurance program for low-income kids in Texas; it costs $16.00 per month for the entire family. A friend who works trying to get families enrolled has been told often: Why should we pay $16.00 when we can get anything we need for free? These folks use the Emergency Room for everything from insect bites to childbirth. (Infant mortality rates, anybody see a connection?) My niece works in billing for a small community hospital; mostly the uninsured use false addresses so bills are useless. Is this better than "national healthcare"? YOU BET IT IS. As one of our fellow posters said: We have it already in the Veteran's System. I see a lot of medical records from VA facilities. The amount of money being simply thrown away is astounding. It is common to see a guy in his 30's with back pain walk out with a half dozen prescription drugs. The VA staff seem most interested in keeping their own jobs intact and keeping patients coming back for more drugs AKA "treatment." There are whole sections devoted to finding victims of "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder"...more drugs and more "treatment." I'd love to see a comparison of how much it costs to handle similar cases in the VA versus the private system. It would probably make me sick.
Finally, when's the last time you saw a sick poor person dying in a ditch in the United States...EMS would be there with an (air-conditioned) ambulance in 5 minutes.
Now if only we could stop the maggot lawyers from suing our medical system to death...
Merci
Je suis Acadienne (Louisiana)