[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by Azure

The cost of the $1.5T dollar Obamacare program.

It would cost $666/month/person for the coverage that plan offers.

Wait, you're saying you want this plan to get passed, but you don't even know specifics? Seriously?

Keep in mind, though--that health care costs in the U.S. are stupidly high--and that's not something that can be changed just by sending the bill to a different address, which is all the Obama health plan (though since he was actually pretty minimally involved--the Pelosi health plan might be more accurate) really provides for.

At best, it's a bandaid solution to a much wider, much more profound problem with health care than the plan's proponents realize. At worst it'll be a massive boondoggle. I think the former is likelier--you think the second is more likely--but I think we both agree that the plan doesn't address the real challenges that health care in America faces.

The costs of Obama's plan are high because the costs of health care are vastly inflated by an inefficient health care industry that requires enough administrators, billing specialists and so on to fill a hollowed out volcano. Making matters worse is the fact that in deciding what procedures to do, doctors are generally only accountable to the bottom line, which leads to massive overspending that patients have very little control over.

Here's an example of a procedure that makes the system more expensive for everyone. Coronary artery stents are just one example of a procedure that is expensive, useless in most patients that receive it, and over-utilized by a factor of about 10 because everyone involved makes mountains of cash from the procedure. If you're a doctor in the U.S., which would you rather do--write a scrip for lipitor and bill your patient's insurance for 150 dollars, or get your patient under the knife and bill his insurance company for 25,000 dollars? As a result, in spite of research showing that stents are basically useless in chronic angina cases, something like 80% of patients that receive stents have chronic angina that would be correctable through diet and medication.

In Canada, stent use is much lower. But outcomes in cardiac care are better.

There are a lot of similar examples, but this one is particularly egregious because a simple regulation of this procedure could save the industry billions of dollars. It shows that right now the health care industry in the U.S. is designed to make a few people very rich--not to provide service to the people who need it.