A Blog From The Editor's Desk By Heather

Recently Massachusetts passed Manditory Health Care Reform. I say hold on not so fast I do not see it as the utopia like the media presents it to be. I have problems with it. While it does cover healthcare for all on a sliding pay scale for all the wealthy paying more the poorest paying nothing it engages in what the republicans love, that being class warfare the Wealthy get the best medical coverage and treatment and the poor on medicaid are stuck with lousy coverage most likely going to charitable healt trust hospitals where they will wait in emergency rooms perhaps days before receiving medical care with charitable hospitable overworked and understaffed

The poor will have medicaid sounds good right? well not so fast, remember the republican neoconic ax weilding gremlin like critters are wreaking havoc in congress cutting medicaid in congress just like the dastardly trolls in the movie "gremlins" Every month reciprients are getting riders in the mail saying what medicaid will not cover be it medicine or health or hospital coverage or perhaps coverage for certain diseases

Naturally the people that can afford more will receive better healthcare. Again its a battle of the haves and the have nots, which is why Republican Governor Mitt "Witt" Rommney signed in on it and signed the bill into law.

What is needed is National Health Care like the rest of the free world has where rich or poor people get the same exact health care! Yes Hillary had it right, but the republican fear mongering machine went in to full gear with scare tactics lost no time bashing Hillary and doing what they do best using scare tactics. Unfortunately it worked the Clintons backed down. This is why to this day republicans have such an intense hatred for Hillary Clinton, they live in mortal fear that if Hillary did get in and at some point in her administration there were a democratic majority in both houses of congress that the Kennedy's, Pelosi's, Conyers, Waxman's Kerry's etc. would sign in on it, and that gives the republicans nightmares....heaven forbid the poor get equal treatment of something with the wealthy.....shock horrors repblicans will be in a severe state of apoplexy.

National Healthcare or what the republican scare machine calls "Socialized Medicine" time has come.

I argue that no nation currently operates a truly free market in the delivery of health car. Some of them also argue that the free market is better able to allocate discretionary spending where consumers value it the most. There is variation amongst individuals about how much they value peace of mind and a lower risk of death. For example, a public-funded system, based on cost efficiency, might limit access to a pap smear only once every five years if the patient was not positive for the human papilloma virus. In a private system, a consumer can choose to be screened more often, and enjoy the luxury of greater peace of mind and reduced risk, if they value this more than other luxury items. Such "luxury" discretionary spending might be moved to non-medical luxury goods and should not be viewed as available to fund a public system as is assumed in some analyses.

The United States does spend more on health care, as an absolute dollar amount and per capita, than any other nation. It also spends a greater fraction of its national budget on health care than Canada, Germany, France, or Japan. In 2001 the United States spent $4,887USD per person on health care, more than double the rate of any other G7 country except Japan, which spent $2,627 per capita annually. Risk factors specific to the U.S. population, such as a relatively high prevalence of obesity, may partially explain increased health care spending; however, many other industrialized nations do share these problems to some extent. Although the U.S. Medicare coverage of prescription drugs is scheduled to begin in 2006, most patented prescription drugs are significantly more costly in the United States than in most other countries. Factors involved are the absence of U. S. government price controls, enforcement of intellectual property rights limiting the availability of generic drugs until after patent expiration, and the monopoly purchasing power seen in national single-payer systems. Many U.S. citizens obtain their medications, directly or indirectly, from foreign sources, to take advantage of lower prices.

The United States system does have substantial public components. Of every dollar spent on health care in the United States, 44 cents comes from some level of government. The elderly are covered by Medicare, the poor (those with assets of less than $2,000) are covered by Medicaid, merchant seamen are covered by the Public Health System, and retired railway workers and military veterans are also covered by the government. Government also affects private sector medicine through licensing and regulatory barriers to entry into health professions.

Most experts believe that the U.S. system is best described as exhibiting greater inequality than others, with covered people receiving a very high quality of care and the uninsured and underinsured receiving a lower standard of care. It is not clear that the lower standard of care received by the uninsured and underinsured in the United States is actually lower than that of other nations that provide complete publicly funded health care. Facilities, such as emergency rooms, hospitals, and urgent care facilities are often required to treat everyone by law.