The health care reform debate for me seems to have reached the point of a gerbil spinning on the wheel in its cage. The Republicans are going to get their way because the spineless Democrats just can't seem to up their game and just get it done. There's no single payer system and the public option is going to leave a trail of blood before it ever becomes part of the plan. Obama will have exhausted all his political capital and nothing else is getting done while American soldiers are dying in record numbers in Afghanistan (and let's not forget Iraq). So why can't there be a solution to this mess? Read after the jump my humble idea and I'm sure it won't fly anywhere because it makes too much sense.
If anything America has to offer is choices. Let's look for example at where you do your banking. I can't even imagine how many different banks there are out there but probably at least a thousand different ones. People have their choice where to bank. Most banks are for profit but because we have choices we also have not-for-profit banks which are credit unions. I choose to do my banking at a credit union where making a profit is not the main goal of the credit union. It used to be that when I wrote a check it was called a "share draft" because credit unions had to be slightly different in their wording than banks but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I get all my services I need at the credit union and I've completely satisfied.
There are non-profit health care systems out there and why can't not-for-profit organizations run hospitals, pharmacies, clinics and so forth on a a larger scale? It works for almost every industry and it presents the best of both worlds. Some may argue that the for-profit health care providers would have the best doctors and best care but I don't think so. I just have to believe that doctors, nurses and other health-care providers would be spread evenly between the two systems. Look at teachers, some work at private schools and some work at public schools and you get good and bad teachers at both.
Where is it written that pharmaceutical companies have to be run for profit? Surely someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett would love to endow a not-for-profit pharmaceutical company to do research and develop medicines to benefit mankind without making the almighty dollar? In fact universities all over the world are doing research to develop new drugs and the government subsidizes this endeavor since public monies are spent to support universities.
Is this an oversimplication of the problem? You tell me. The reason why other countries are so far ahead of us in providing health care for a better value is because they are not-for-profit. When profit is your bottom line in running a company it will always be more expensive to deliver a service to the customer.