Health Care

There are so many issues with the healthcare system that I really don't know where to start thinking about them.  The ones that I know off the top of my head are:

• High healthcare costs
• Difficulty in getting insurance
• State-by-state regulations
• Difficulty understanding what coverage you have
• Doctors scared of being sued/high cost of malpractice insurance
• Doctors performing more tests than necessary
• Little or no preventative care nationwide
• Insurance companies with too much lobbying power
• Possible fraudulent activity, due to high value and low penalties
• Unequal knowledge (patients vs. doctors vs. insurance companies vs. regulators vs. everyone!)
• The debate about the universal right to healthcare, or not
• Supply limitation due to high barrier to becoming a doctor
• Specialist is more lucrative than general care is more lucrative than nurse, but they re useful in reverse order, creating abundance and scarcity at the same time

So, the question is - how do you fix all those problems?  The fix almost depends on where you stand on the role of government in people's lives.  It also depends on your world outlook, your current state of health, and your empathy with your fellow Americans.  I'd even argue that it depends on your hipocracy.  

Each of the items above have many different possible intervention points.  Depending on your information, some points are easier to see than others, but of course they vary in impact, cost, and social acceptability.  I believe that they are all interrelated, aside from all concerning the healthcare industry.  I'm convinced that there is one or a small series of causes that all the current problems with healthcare can be attributed to.  

In the future, I'm going to read up on the new healthcare bill and see how it addresses the issues I mentioned above.  

I'd love to hear you comments on my list of issues, what you think any root causes are, and what you'd do differently to make healthcare perfect.