Create the American Health Care system.

[nana053]

Originally Posted by jetgraphics

Perhaps you misunderstand. I suggest abolishing socialized medicine and getting government out of healthcare entirely.
That does not involve the middle class in paying for the bill.

The "obscene cost" is a recent development.
The problem is quite simple : the more takers shoehorned in between the patient and the care giver, the higher the cost - to the patient or to the one paying the bill.

Takers include government, bureaucrats, administrative overhead, taxes, stockholders, red tape, bankers, etc, etc.

An example of pre-socialist healthcare cost:

1930 example
FCHP - Hospital bill from 1930
In 1930, $66 bought a mom in Kansas a 10-day hospital stay and delivery of her new baby.
($4/day for the room)
. . .
LA:
Verdugo Views: There was a time when a hospital stay cost $4 a day - LA Times
($4/day for the room in a ward. A front corner room went for $10 per day.)
. . .

No form of government meddling, subsidy, insurance or other burdens will ever drive down the cost.

GLORIOUS SOCIALISM
Average Cost Per Inpatient Day Across 50 States in 2010
Hospital bed cost per day
United States
• State/local government hospitals — $1,625
• Non-profit hospitals — $2,025
• For-profit hospitals — $1,629

COST INCREASE : 40,725% increase ($1,629/$4)
($1,629/$4 = 407.25 X 100 = 40725%)
(Somebody has to pay for all the bureaucracy, paper work, clerks, adjusters, investigators, supervisors, guys in clown suits, etc, etc.)

This is the result of government meddling in medicine for over 120 years.

You are comparing 1930, a time without health insurance at all with today when we want everyone to have health insurance.

In 1930, many people went without healthcare entirely. We don't want to return to that model.

http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/suic/Refe...8e7d3a4a970777

In the 1930s the biggest health concern of America was how to pay for medical needs. The national income was less than half of what it had been in 1929, and in several states as many as 40 percent of the people were on relief. Many Americans could not pay their medical bills, and visits to physicians and hospitals decreased. Before the Depression, physicians charged a fee-for-service on a sliding scale and collected their bills as best they could. They also saw some patients on a charity basis and passed the expenses along to those who could pay. Loss of medical services and reduced ability to pay meant lower incomes for physicians, too. While doctors as a group fared better than many other professions during the Depression, in many cases they also saw their incomes halved. Hospitals were in similar trouble. Beds went empty as patients could no longer afford a two-week hospitalization, which was the average in 1933. Bills were unpaid, and charitable contributions to hospital fund-raising efforts fell.

Note those doctors were often working for free because people could not afford to pay.

The inability of many Americans to afford the medical care they needed led to changes in health insurance and changes in the government's role in providing funds for health care and medical costs. The great increase in the role of hospitals, clinics, and laboratories created the need for reform within the organization of medicine, which led to the growth of the medical specialty boards. Had the private fee-for-service medical system worked as effectively as its AMA advocates insisted, it is likely that the hodgepodge of government and private agencies involved in the delivery of medical care would not have come into existence. The questions of medical reform were not solved in the 1930s and would affect issues of medicine in the United States for decades to come.