[sailaway21]

Government created the problem in the age of wage controls during WWII. The employer could not give the employee a raise but he could give him health insurance. I fail to see how government run helath care is going to make the providing of health care more effective or cheaper. If you receive a health insurance policy from your company you are a slave to what policy your company can afford to provide and the terms of that policy's coverage. Automobiles have gotten progressively more expensive, and more expensive to fix, and yet we have not seen the skyrocketing of insurance premiums we've seen in the medical field. The consumer has control of his auto insurance costs in a way he does not with medical insurance, and there's competition for his business. We all try to become parts of a group insurance plan and, by doing so, we become part of the problem. Costs will continue to skyrocket until each individual is personally in charge of his own insurance, as in autos. At that point the insurance companies will be unable to assign an employer a premium and tack on a profit based upon actuarial tables, and be forced to compete for each of our business individually. Remember when the phone long distance service was deregulated? You got a call every 15 minutes with a better offer.

There would also need to be a "pool", just as in auto insurance, for high risk patients/drivers. Meating that need is the challenge in auto insurance and it would be so in health insurance.

Those obscene profits are what allow those drug companies to research and develop new drugs. Fixing the prices as Canada does just ensures there will not be a pharmaceutical industry in Canada. If no one has noticed, it should be pointed out that all of the pharmaceutical companies are located within the US, regardless of their country of origin. Developing their products within the US is the only way that they can currently make a return on investment in research. The high prices we pay are directly attributable to the fixing of prices overseas. the drug companies sell overseas because it's better to make a little money than no money at all, especially on a product that has a limited patent life/profitability life.

windy is right. It is broken. And government must address it. How they choose to do that is the $64 question. I don't think that more government involvement is the answer, in fact, I think that government is the problem. As PJ O'Rourke says, "You think health care is expensive now? Just wait until it's free!".