Health Care not Health Insurance

American want affordable health care.  The cost of modern medicine has exceeded the ability of most people to pay for it without insurance.

In an attempt to help the uninsured in this country we saw the affordable care act which was successful in extending care to millions of previously uninsured people.  It certainly wasn't perfect and as certain flaws emerged the congress because of partisan politics wasn't interested in improving it.

Now, I don't want to argue the overall benefits, it helped people who didn't have insurance already but it had some negative impact on people who previously had insurance, at least in some cases.

Statistically it was clearly a net benefit but no one likes to be in the negative part of a statistic.

 Now repealing it has turned out to be a difficult task and as our current president seemed to discover, quite complex.

However, if we simply address the question of how to provide quality health care to all Americans we may see some solutions.

Now the quality care is part of the problem.  Some people with good benefits don't want to see their choice of doctors or hospitals diminished.

For a long time we have had an overall shortage of doctors in this country, especially in certain areas.  Increasing the number of doctors or health practitioners who can take some of the work is something that helps deliver more health care to more people.

Now, our system effectively uses commercial providers to collect money and pay health care professionals, based on the provisions of their policies.  This creates in-network and out of network systems that in some cases are problematic.

People want to be able to go to a doctor to get treated without having to go through a long list of acceptable practitioners.  Further, certain plans can't attracts popular doctors because the reimbursement schedules are too low.

Medicare is a system that works fairly well, although it also has some of the same issues, especially with getting doctors to accept the payment schedules.  So is Medicare for all a viable solution?

It might be.  Remember of course that in this country a lot is determined by who owns the most legislators and the health insurance industry has bought quite a few.  It unlikely that we are going to pass anything that seriously erodes their profits.

Once again its a complex issue that begs for a simple solution, "Quality Health Care for All".

Getting there is the problem.