Kevin Drum writes about Healthcare

The American Healthcare Scam from Kevin Drum:

"I have long thought that the spectre of "socialized medicine" is the greatest con ever perpetrated on the American public. Think about it. Suppose you were constructing a healthcare system from scratch. Choice #1 is national healthcare along the lines of France or Sweden. (Not Britain. Their system kind of sucks.)

"Choice #2 is this: if you're employed, your employer might provide you with healthcare coverage of some kind. Anytime you change employers or your employer changes plans, your coverage and your doctor will change too. If you're unemployed, or you work for Wal-Mart, you get nothing -- though in a pinch you can always show up at an emergency room, which is perhaps the most expensive way of delivering healthcare known to man. If you're poor, there's a shabby government program that will sort of cover your kids, but probably not you. If you're over 65, another government program will cover some but not all of your medical expenses. And all of this will cost us about 14% of GDP, far more than any other industrialized country on the planet.

"That's insane. No one would design a healthcare system like that. But that's what we have, thanks mostly to a weird set of coincidences and political compromises made around the time of World War II."

What amazes me even more than the spotty, overpriced service of American healthcare is the fact that it doesn't cover everyone, and that it costs roughly 25% of all expenditures to make the decisions of who is covered and what services they will be allowed to use. In addition, it piles excessive healthcare costs onto products like automobiles where it makes GM and Ford less competitive internationally. The American healthcare lack-of-system is utterly irrational.

But one need not attempt to convince conservatives who object to national financing of healthcare to do something because it is rational. Being rational violates conservative morals or something. That's why they get along so well with religious fundamentalists.