I ran across an article on CNN.com which not only provided a reiteration of the cost statistics for healthcare, but pointedly said who would pay for it. In the article it said...

"The price for...indifference will be high. If efforts at better cost containment fail once again, and health care costs rise -- as almost surely (they will) -- (those costs) will be borne entirely by the family...(The average) family's disposable income would be much higher if the growth of future health spending was better controlled. And, as noted, many smaller firms will stop altogether providing job-based health insurance."

I'm reading the word "indifference" as the public accepting either no healthcare reform legislation at all, or "reforms" which will be transparently ineffective. Regardless of our political or ideological preferences, this country has a huge problem. We all need to demand legislative solutions from our elected representatives. I wish I could say that the operation of the free market can reasonably be expected to solve the problem, but it hasn't and very likely will not in the future. As the author in the article notes, in less than a decade healthcare costs have doubled, consistently rising at an average annual rate of 8.4%. Unless that trend is reversed--the cost curve "bent" as all the talking heads are saying--by 2019 the average family will be paying over $36,000 a year for it's health insurance. If that is unaffordable, lots of employers will simply stop offering health insurance as a benefit and many families will have to join the tens of millions without any insurance at all.

We've argued vehemently about the "redistribution of wealth". If we all stand by and permit nothing to happen to seriously reform healthcare in this country, there will definitely be a redistribution of wealth. The wealthiest Americans will be a little angry because their insurance premiums went up. The poorest can't worry any more than they do now, using hospital ER's as their source of healthcare--there'll just be a lot more of them. It'll be the shrinking middle class who will see it's income redistributed, mostly to pay for healthcare for the indigent and poor.

Before any of us lock in to ideals that would make any sort of healthcare reform unacceptable to us, before we blast one another on this forum over one ideology or another, we need to think about the result if something very robust doesn't get passed. The politicians who are supposedly debating on our behalf won't have to worry--they'll still have their gold-plated Congressional health insurance. The executives in the healthcare industry will still be getting multi-million dollar bonuses. No one will have to hold a tag day for the doctors. It'll be us--you and me, Republican and Democrat--who will bear the brunt of their unyielding ideology, political partisanship and legislative ineffectiveness.

Think about it...please, just think about it.

Read the entire article at...http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/...ref=newssearch