Do you all truly believe that adding another 40 million Americans currently without coverage to the healthcare line will allow us to maintain the same level of quality of care and access to care? Let’s be realistic… We already have a significant shortage of doctors and nurses and healthcare infrastrucutre.

Let’s look at doctors: Compare the pay of a doctor and the cost of a medical degree vs another advanced degree like becoming a lawyer. The Physician pay just hasn’t kept up…this discourages people from signing up for 6-12 years of school and residency and a big mountain of student loans for less pay than other professional degrees. why? Simple: Government pays for and regulates Medicare and Medicaid. Why do you think some doctors don’t accept Medicare and Medicaid patients? Duh: the government doesn’t pay the same rates as the insurance companies. The doctors that do accept those types of patients either make much less money (sometimes these patients make up 50% of their patient base) or they make up the difference in the VOLUME of patients and your quality of care suffers significantly. I won’t even try to go into how the regulation of the government run system has destroyed the single doctor practice. Let’s just say that more regulation equals more staff to try and keep up with the regulation resulting in even less realizable revenue for the doctors. Not to mention the fact that a single doctor can't afford the initial equipment investment required to even be a general practioner these days.

Let’s look at nurses: The average age of a nurse is 45 and only getting older. Why? More than a few reasons but here is one… Most nurses must join the nursing unions. This puts them at the bottom of the heap in terms of seniority which makes them work nights, weekends, holidays while they gain their seniority NO MATTER HOW GOOD THEY ARE AT DELIVERING CARE!!!! (This is a pet issue of mine and one of the reasons I left a government job... no matter how good you are you only get promoted on a timeline)

Lastly, Why have the costs of healthcare gone up?  We have made significant advances in our abilities to discover, diagnose and treat illnesses that have up until now been unknown or otherwise untreatable. This is great news, however, we are making these advances on the backs of advanced technology like newer MRI machines and CT scanners and all kinds of other machines like robotic surgery, etc... These machines cost millions of dollars and the hospitals buying them must recoup their purchase costs and the high level of maintenance and calibration required to remain effective. The bottom line is it’s not evil hospitals and insurance companies just arbitrarily jacking up cost and going in the back room and counting their money… the cost of healthcare has legitimately gone up and will continue to go up as we make  further advances in technology and have to refresh these machines like we refresh our laptops and desktops. You wouldn’t want to have a test run from a machine that was 10 years old that might miss something do you? Didn’t think so. 

Bottom line is adding 40 million Americans to the system without adding the proportionate amount of healthcare delivery systems and people is a dumb idea that CAN ONLY degrade access to care and quality of care. We need healthcare reform but it must be well understood, well planned, well executed and well funded. Let’s take our time and do this right the first time instead of redoing it 5 years from now.