Throwing out the baby...

We have a president and congress hell-bent on remaking the entire American health care system. But is that necessary? Do they know what's broken? Is the system even in need of overhaul?

America has the best physicians and medicine the world has ever known. Sick people are treated rapidly (much faster than in other countries with socialized medicine), with medicines and cures that are the best available. So why should we monkey with that?

Because the lower classes - from where the Democrats get their votes - think so.

Taking out the argument that the lower classes are notorious for not taking care of themselves, thereby requiring much more expensive procedures to fix the worsening diseases that ail them, Who should pay?

Payment is at the heart of the argument. It's not whether we have a good health care system or not. We do. It's who will pay for people who either can't or won't.

There are apparently a lot of people unaware that America already has a version of socialized medicine; we actually have two of them. To review, the system is designed to pay for medical treatment of the sick who can't pay. It's called MedicAid. There's a like system for the elderly and those on Social Security; it's called MediCare. So what's the beef? The problem is that these government-run systems are a mess, don't work all the time, and never pay for the entirety of the treatment.

So there is the problem: the US government-run systems. But in keeping with the things that Congress likes to do, they want to fix the aspect of the healthcare system that's not broken, maybe to keep it inline with the disaster that is the government-run systems now. If we make the entire system government-run, expect the entire US health care system to function like MediCare, namely, that Michael Moore gets his wish, and the Cuban healthcare system will then actually be better than that in the US.

So the solution is rather quite a bit smaller than that attempted by the Democrats: Let's fix the government-run systems like MedicAid and MediCare, and leave private medicine alone.