You folks read what you want to read into anything someone writes here. Obviously, your minds are made up. Why bother with any sort of discourse that might possibly cause one to think about the situation?

First sentence, fifth paragraph of my reply..."I'm certainly not proposing that we have national health care."

What I did say, if you chose to read what I wrote, is that for all intents and purposes from the doctor's perspective, we already have many of the disadvantages associated with national health care, socialized medicine, or whatever else you might wish to call such a system. Doctors and hospitals no longer have the authority to prescribe what they believe is proper treatment. Their ability to make a profit is tightly controlled by a table of prescribed payments that is declining each year. The attractiveness of a career in medicine IS declining, as is reflected in medical school enrollments and the closure of medical schools themselves. There is a growing, dramatic shortage of internal medicine and family practice physicians. There is a shortage of medical doctors of any specialty in exurban and rural areas.

Healthcare in the U.S. is controlled by the insurance companies and the corporations, unions or other organizations that engage them to administer healthcare benefits. While one might call it the "free market", the results are very much the same as if healthcare was provided by a single payor, like the government. I went on to say that if the federal government was that single payor, the issue of tort reform needed to control runaway malpractice litigation and the skyrocketing malpractice premiums, would be essentially resolved.

Please READ what I said. I'm not necessarily recommending government sponsored healthcare. What I am saying is that we already are experiencing many of the disadvantages under our current system that many of you resist with knee-jerk precision.

Don't just read what people write with the thought that you will automatically post a critical response. Think about it sometimes...please.

P.S. Thanks, Steve, for the amplification of why medical malpractice litigation would likely decline precipitously if cases had to be adjudicated in federal courts. And I apologize for using the "sleazy lawyer" term. You were correct in calling me out for that.

While the frequency of preventable medical errors is alarming, I wonder if they would be so frequently identified identified were it not for the escalating number of malpractice litigations? Were they always there, but we're just finding out about them because of the lawsuits? Or, I wonder how many would be preventable if doctors were able to prescribe treatment and tests without the stringent oversight of an insurance company administrator? Or whether the problems and recidivism of patients might decline if insurance companies didn't essentially "kick patients out" of hospitals earlier than medically desirable?

Again, what I'm saying is that we might already be experiencing those same disadvantages that critics associate with socialized medicine, national healthcare, or the like.