Both Single Payer and Cost Control are Required for the US Health System, but Neither are Coming

For at least 20 years now the most important reason why the Canadian health care system is better than the American one is simply that the Canadian system is far cheaper. It's not only prescription drugs (that many Americans import from Canada) but numerous other health care goods and services that are far cheaper in Canada as well. Obviously, the huge private insurance companies in the US have not only directly and indirectly denied health care to tens of millions, but they have also ballooned the costs of goods and services to the point where today it's more the cost itself rather than who pays which is ruining health care in the US and, by hogging resources, the economy as a whole.

Now along comes O'bama, who is apparently reneging on his pledge to not require people to buy grossly overpriced insurance. So now residents of the US are facing massive unemployment from a depression (or at least a massive recession), lower real incomes every year, and a new, completely unprecedented requirement to buy an overpriced private product. Obviously, at least two thirds (and probably much more) of the current uninsured can not afford to buy it even at a 20% discount.

Any mandate will create a very large new enforcement bureaucracy which, you guessed it, would make the US system even more expensive still. If the poor are exempted from buying insurance, you have to ask: Can the US afford to, without greatly reducing the costs themselves, pay for tens of millions of people to buy insurance? Or, to pose the question more accurately, will the Chinese and other funders of the US debt sign on for this new burden?

So what is going to happen to the already forsaken poor in the US? Do they get shuffled off to jail if they can't pay for private (or public, for that matter) health insurance? I mean, the US already won the sweepstakes for most people in jail than any other country, so where does that insanity end?

At this point, anything less than full single payer AND big cost reductions will be a hopelessly inadequate attempt to “reform” the health care system. It is already too late to save either the health care system or the US economy as a whole with just single payer alone. Because the cost of health care is one of the things that is eating the economy alive.