The problem with our health care system is that health care, as an industry, keeps growing while the rest of the economy has stalled. All of the "fixes" in the world won't change the fact that health care does not have foreign competition inthe domestic market, while virtually every other industry fights day to day (and often loses) to survive. Political "silver bullets" rarely kill anything, except our pocketbooks. So the thought that just because "the government" is going to do anything just doesn't mean anything will be better.
The CBO report on HR 3200 (
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/104xx/doc10464/hr3200.pdf) is as non-biased as it gets, and it says the numbers are askew, especially the public-perceived cost effect that medical malpractice has on health care costs. No medical association has rebutted the numbers, leading to the belief that the CBO's assessment is correct.
When I had my own business, I too paid about $1,000/mo for family health care and the employer's contribution to Social Security. That goes with the turf when you are your own boss.
I agree with you that it is strange the drug companies can sell their products almost everywhere else in the world for significantly lower prices. It has the hefty aroma of price-fixing monopoly-style, yet no Attorney General for as long as I can remember has ever disclosed if this phenomena has ever been investigated as a "Sherman Act" violation. If Mr. Holder would care to pursue this issue, his popularity would increase.
Let us not kid ourselves on how long it will take to implement any new system nationally, regardless of what it looks like. No matter what the statute says, regulation-writing takes a significant amount of labor, public review and comment, revision and posting. Right now, there is no labor to do that. Acquiring the labor, by contract or federal employees or both, will take a few months based on preparing the personnel warrants, interviewing, screening, getting on -the-job, finding places for them to sit, getting office materials, and that's just to get the regulations written. The comes setting up the field offices to administer, hiring and training more folk (in the thousands!), new forms (that's a thrill to create!), and the list goes on. We are talking about YEARS before any new system trying to be fielded nationally can even work halfway right.
Congress and the Administration are trying to give the impression that they are heroes with the passage of legislation - unfunded legislation at that! Any statute is only step-one of one hundred. Yet, the public will see the confetti being thrown like a miracle has happened, and expect it all to be working in a week or so. Projection (mine): After any statute is passed 2 /12 years before regulations of substance (and only some of many) will be fielded; another year to two before the complaint process (adjudication of claims, set-up of administrative courts and special hearings, etc) works, and that will have docket backlogs spanning many months; for the first 5 years, the contractor-to-employee ratio will be 2:1 at best (and contractors won't have any authority to settle complaints). In the meantime, the costs to set up all of this (new agencies, logos, documents, facilities, people, training, IT system conversions and interfacing, court battles) will reign supreme. Compared to this, establishing the Department of Homeland Security was child's play!
I have to hand it to Canada. They had the good sense to make it work in one province first, and then other provinces came onboard one-at-a-time. We, in our arrogance, want to just blast forward nationally and hope for the best. Does that REALLY make sense?