From the Economist, http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14258877 “If American politicians peddle falsehoods about what goes on in other countries, Americans are correspondingly less likely to appreciate the extent to which they are being let down.”
 

Americans are already spending enough to cover every man, woman and child in the United States,  and provide first rate, excellent healthcare, but the system is being looted by the insurance and drug companies and by private medical facilities that have been allowed to form a kind of medical cartel, which limits the choices of Americans and rations care for most of the people now covered.
 
The government does have to ‘keep its hands out of the pockets’ of the American taxpayer, but luckily for the American taxpayer, there is a huge pool of money already in the system. The government just has to regulate how this money is being spent, so that more of it gets spent on healthcare, and less on mansions and yachts for the executives in the system.
 
Look at more statistics…Does America really have the best care in the world?
United States: one doctor for every 416 people
In Switzerland: one doctor for every 256 people
Netherlands: one doctor for every 256 people
 
Despite the enormous amounts of money spent on healthcare in the United States,  figures for infant mortality and lifespan put the United States in the bottom quarter of statistics for industrialized nations. 
 
America is already spending enough money. But Obama called in the insurance and drug lobbyists, and let them write legislation that would essentially give them more money to continue just as they are. When Obama tried to include a Public Option, the insurance industry saw this as a potential threat, and began seeding the media and fomenting the fearful with the idea that the Public Option would be akin to turning America into Stalinist Russia. The drug companies were already holding the winning ace in the legislation, because they promised a savings of $80 billion from an unknown ceiling of expenditures. The government promised to not negotiate the starting prices that the savings would be deducted from. That’s like a store inflating prices on the stickers and then claiming huge percentages of savings in a sale.
 
Drug companies scream that they need the money they are paid, or else there will be no more motivation for innovation and research in America and America will lose its ‘edge’. The truth is that most research and development for new drugs and treatments is already mostly funded by the taxpayer and is done in universities and public hospitals, with the drug companies waiting to scoop up the lion’s share of the profitable patents that ensue. The drug companies spend much, much more on advertising and lobbying and executive compensation than they do on research and development.  The drug companies also make a lot of their money on older patents, and they try to keep any new drugs on the back shelf until the old patents expire, because they don’t want their new products to compete with the old ones. Furthermore, after patents expire, they have various barely legal ways to keep cheaper generic versions off the market.
 
Another huge waste of money in the American system, and one which is not even fully calculated in the ‘per capita’ spending, is the legal morass of malpractice law. Tort reform is urgently needed. Settlements have to have some relationship to reality; experts called in to testify have to be better regulated; lawyers have to be paid on the basis of work done, not on a percentage of the win; and there has to be a ‘loser’ pay element to the system, because now the doctor who is proven innocent still loses thousands and thousands of dollars in time and money spent fighting the case, and law firms can put junior, low paid para-legal teams to work on a variety of cases in a kind of legal speculation, looking for the jury award gold, and paying nothing for the lives and careers they disrupt and paying nothing for the burden they exact on society as a whole by increasing healthcare costs.
 

Americans have to stop chanting, ‘We have the best healthcare in the world!” and start asking ‘How come we spend so much money? Who is looting our system? Do other countries have better solutions that we should consider?”
 
It’s time for blogs and newspapers and the television media to do genuine side-by-side comparisons of healthcare systems in other industrialized nations, and learn from them.
 
It’s time to stop listening to the fearmongers who find horror stories of negligence or malpractice in other countries and present these stories as being the whole story and proof that other nations live in a healthcare nightmare. If the worst stories of neglect and malpractice from the United States were presented as how all healthcare works in America, people would instantly recognize that this is a monumentally unfair way to view any system.
 
Americans have to start demanding that their politicians fight for them and for better healthcare in America, and stop fighting on behalf of the drug and insurance industry profits.

But it seems clear that the White House and key Democrats were always planning on negotiating it away in exchange for industry support. Isn’t that how it always works in Washington? No matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter which party controls the levers of government, the same set of narrow monied interests and right-wing values dictate outcomes…

Even the clueless koolaid drinker Frank Rich basically made the same point — the fix is in. He even started to make the leap that Obama is part of that fix, he is not victimized by it — he was elected by it.

The corporate owned media picks our Presidents. NOW do these people see why they WANTED Obama? I was shocked by how many Dems I talked to last year just couldn’t figure this out. I said ask yourselves “who benefits”? If it were really Hillary Clinton who was the “corporate wh*re” as some tried to paint her, then the media would have been pushing for her instead of vilifying her daily. I assure you we would have seen a lot more vetting of Obama than we did. Instead, he got the messianic treatment.

They got the salesman they wanted. Hows that working out?

“Re-refer when aneurysm is larger.”

If President Obama wants to better understand why America’s discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.

Last year, bureaucrats at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, “Your Life, Your Choices.” It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA’s preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated “Your Life, Your Choices.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574358590107981718.html