Lots of good comments here.
Here's my plan for reducing healthcare costs, and making it affordable for everyone.
1. Limit liability, but somehow replace it with responsibility. Even with huge insurance costs. hospitals and doctors routinely screw up. Staff infections should not even be possible, but yet they effect or kill 1 out of 20 patience.
2. Hospitals should not be liable for people who can't pay. And, can not pass costs of the uninsured on to their customers. I know it's cold hearted. But, if hospitals didn't treat the uninsured, costs would be 1/2 or 1/3 of current costs, and more people/companies could afford to offer insurance. It's a liberal catch 22, hold hospitals liable, so they must take on extra costs, that then must be passed on, that then make it too expensive to afford health care. It's wrong to charge some uninsured person 3 times the value of what he received, and bankrupt him, because the poor can not pay. It's WRONG.
3. Were pass the point of being able to afford the miracle drugs, the drug companies can produce. Yha, it's nice to have life saving drugs, but only the very well insured, or the extremely poor will be able to get them. Allow more generics, figure out a way to bring drugs to market quicker, and control costs. And, just try telling people no sometimes. Oh, and anyone caught abusing the drug system should be dealt with.
4. Finance medical care for the uninsured with private donations. If people are unwilling to give, then they have voted with their wallets. The federal government is not the supreme morality.
5. Pull the plug on people. Cold hearted sure, but there's 6.5 billion people on this planet, one won't be missed. No more superhuman effort to save murders, and drug junkies, and those that have thrown their lives away. Let the very old die in peace.
6. Provide more government clinics for the poor. Yha, there's no reason we can't catch things before they get bad. But, as a uninsured/poor person, you shouldn't expect the best doctors. And, this will allow us to show the real and actual cost of poor, uninsured, and illegals.
7. Encourage more people to get insurance coverage. If more people are covered, there will be less uninsured. But, this requires costs be reduced, mostly by not giving service to those that can't pay. And, limiting drugs and high cost services.
Oh, and about the infant mortality. That's a complicated question. Many people believe that the number of IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) in the US are the problem, and that since insurance doesn't cover the procedure (unlike Europe), people load up on eggs to increase the odds, where Europe limits the number of eggs. Thereby, greatly reducing the number of multiple births (twins or more), which have a much higher chance of dieing.
It also may have to do with the definition of infant mortality. The definitions are different in the US and Europe. If a baby dies right after birth, they call it a still born in Europe, a infant mortality in the US. Trivial sounding, but it all adds up. Plus there is something going on. African Americans have a huge infant mortality rate in this country.
And, it may also have to do with American's waiting till much later in life to have kids.
