You have not made this clear again and again. You’ve bounced back and forth between the plight of the uninsured, claims that people are dying at the rate of 100,000 – 200,000 per year due to incompetency among medical professionals to American corporations are going bankrupt paying medical benefits they are deciding not to pay.

Extrapolating current trends out to some apocalyptic future and assuming they will continue indefinitely until the system collapses is about as sure a way to be proven wrong as exists. In my adult lifetime I’ve watched this happen with the stagflation of the early 70′s – inflation rates and low growth would continue to inflate and fail to grow until the whole economic system collapsed and we returned to hunting and gathering. Population growth would swamp the ability of man to provide food and we’d all starve. We all should have been speaking Japanese by now since the last American TV factory closed ages ago. We should have used up the earth’s {oil, iron, manganese, aluminum, trees, fish, water, air) 10 or 20 years ago. Y2K would stop half the world’s modern equipment.

Forgive me if I don’t buy into the current sky-is-falling scenario(s) – you put up four or five of them in your last post. I’d be stocking the survival hut in deepest Wymoning if I bought into half of it.

You are enunciating a clear opinion concerning what you perceive to be a problem. I understand your declaration of the problem. You still have not promulgated a principle by which the party that you propose would undertake resolution of the identified problem. If you wish to assert that as a personal principle you believe that the cost of medical treatment for an individual should be a general societal burden, that’s fine by me. If you want to assert the same and claim the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a foundation, that’s fine too. You could even try to stretch the principle of promoting the general welfare within the US constitution to fit (although that would be a very long stretch). Barring that, all you’ve done is establish that you believe there is a problem and that you want my money to fix it.

Btw – having lived through economic situations that were proclaimed to be “the end of civilization as we know it” I don’t place the current situation regarding health care to be any more serious than the savings and loan ‘crisis’ and certainly no where close to the inflation ‘crisis’ of the seventies in severity.

Engaging the trained but uneducated is generally a fool’s errand. The inability to articulate an underlying principle or respond (to Knucklehead in particular) in a manner that addresses the issues raised tells us that further discussion will only result in the needless death of pixels to no good end.

Just thought I’d blat out some additional thoughts.

Are those (Thibaud in this case) who believe we are facing some impending catastrophe due to “health care costs” claiming we are facing a looming national health crisis, a national financial crisis, or both?

Given the rise in longevity and the general improvements in physical wellbeing that have occurred in the span of a single human lifetime it is very difficult to see much of a case for any looming national health crisis. We regularly consume health services that weren’t even conceivably a human lifetime ago. We cannot accurately compare the the value of health services delivered today to those delivered 30, 40, or 70 years ago. Aches, pains, discomforts and even diseases and the effects of aging that were once a standard and accepted part of life are intolerable today. We’ve doubled (actually a little more than that IIRC) the number of years people live in “retirement”. Something is going to kill everyone someday and living longer, comfortably, means we’re going to demand more of everything the health care industry can figure out how to sell us.

I’ve seen no argument, convincing or otherwise, that we are not getting something close to the “value” for which we are paying when it comes to medical care. The fact that the costs of “health care” are a rising portion of GDP and Federal budget mean absolutely diddley unless there is some evidence that our current state of national “health” is not reasonably equal, in value, to what we are spending.

No doubt if we compared, for example, the portion of the federal budget spent on information technology in 1970 vs. that spent in 2004 we’d see an “alarming, across the board, unsustainable growth”. And that for technology that constantly delivers greater value for less money. Nobody in 1970 could have accurately predicted either the demand or value that information technology would be delivering to the government or the society.

The same is true for modern levels of “health care”. Nobody in 1970 could have accurately predicted the amounts, types, or costs of medical and other health services We the People would demand. The health care industry has not reached to point of maturity to be able to constantly deliver more for less – it may never reach that point and even if it is possible it may require fully unleashing the loathesome ravages or rampant, competitive capitalism to get there.

And nobody has any idea what is the “proper proportion” of GDP or federal budget that should be spent on satisfying the national craving for someill-defined thing called “health care”. We all want to live without pain or even discomfort to a ripe old age of 120 and die peacefully in our sleep. We demand an ever closer approximation of that from our “health care industry”. Moving that ball forward is going to cost an increasing proportion of the resources we have to spend if and until something radical alters one or more of the demand for, development of, and delivery of medical services. Unless and until one or more of those factors is radically altered looking for any major cost reductions will be as effective as barking at the moon.

Can someone please explain to me how changing who pays for medical services can possibly reduce the total cost of medical services? And if there are savings to be had by altering who pays, how are those savings likely to be achieved without significantly altering demand (rationing) or the value received (quality)?

You forgot the humbug part, Charlotte. Then again, your post supplied enough of that quantity. No need to repeat, eh?

I’ll repeat my support for a party devoted to Truman-JFK principles of promoting democracy abroad and concern for low- and moderate-income Americans at home. That party doesn’t exist today. A pox on both the elitist pork shovelers and the new reactionaries.

OK, have it your way. Not only does the Democrat Party not articulate any interest in promoting democracy abroad and, hence, security at home, all of yesteryear’s Repubs and hapless Middle America will abandon the program if we don’t:

fix everything we imagine is broken with healthcare and address social and economic injustices to forestall otherwise inevitable financial disasters.

The sky is falling more in America than it is overseas. I hope the Dems, the UN and EU can save us.

And next summer the knives will come out: an OpEd offensive led by the anti-democracy realpolitikers of the Bush 41 admin– Scowcroft, Baker, Eagleburger, et al; strident calls to bring the boys home from Sen Hagel and other midwestern Republicans; and finally a shift in the goalposts by the Bush admin from supporting Iraqi democracy to promoting Iraqi “stability.”