It never ceases to amaze me, the amount of energy that can go into a project just to avoid doing the right thing. The best, simplest, least costly, most effective thing we could do is expand what has been working so well for years, Medicare. You get sick, you get care, and the caregiver gets paid. Nothing could be simpler.

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Now that we are now officially a socialist country"-

By Jack E. Lohman

As bailouts go, here's an idea that will help all citizens and all US industries at the same time, not just AIG and banking and not just GM and Ford.

Implement a "Medicare-for-all"- system that transfers health care costs from all businesses to the public. We are paying everybody's healthcare costs already, let's make the payments meaningful.

A single-payer system will protect all Americans and their children in the process! And it bails out all industry, not just a few favored companies, and it uses the same taxpayer dollars.

It'll reduce employee costs for all companies by typically $6000 per employee per year, provide 100% health care to all Americans, reduce (for example) car prices by $1200-1500 each, save $400 billion in national healthcare costs, and make corporations more competitive with foreign product.

It will save ALL corporations money and keep jobs in the country! It boggles my mind that we still have business leaders that want to control their employee healthcare. Do they not have better things to do?

How can we afford not to do this?

Medicare-for-all is simple, and that's why it is the most efficient. You get sick, you get care, and the caregiver gets paid. Simple as that. The hospital or doctor sends their bill to a different payor, the Medicare contractor. You will go to the same private doctor and hospital as before, they'll just send their bill to a different payor.

This would eliminate the 31% of healthcare costs that are currently consumed by the wasteful insurance bureaucracy. These are costs like high broker commissions, high executive salaries and bonuses and stock options, shareholder profits, cherry-picking and lemon-drop costs, and even lobbying and campaign contributions that are added to the system and passed on to the patient. Medicare's administrative costs are just 3% of the total.

More of the same is not the answer.

And don't you believe that we'll turn into a Canadian system with its wait times. They spend just 10% of GDP and we spend 16.5%. We don't have wait times now, and if the politicians are on the same system we'll not have wait times then. Over 59% of physicians and 80% of nurses support this change!

The only people that won't like it is the insurance industry, and the business associations and politicians that take their money. Let's hope they don't win this battle and put the country further under.

-- Lohman is a retired business owner from Colgate and publishes http://MoneyedPoliticians.net. He authored "Politicians - Owned and Operated by Corporate America" and can be reached at jelohman@gmail.com.

Authors Bio:
Lohman is a retired business owner and is author of "Politicians - Owned and Operated by Corporate America" (www.MoneyedPoliticians.com) and author of http://MoneyedPoliticians.net