We are at a critical phase in progress of our economic status.
We have not yet realized that insurance is not the panacea
for our health....much less our "health care".
We have to go through certain procedures to attain any change in our system. In the "thirties" and "forties", our health care system was
supplemented by unnecessary appendectomies and tonsillectomies.
It was started in the middle of the Depression and continued until
the end of the war.
It was a necessary evil.
It kept our medical world alive.
Then came "health insurance".
Health insurance was the new salvation of the health car
industry. It brought the common man and his family back
into the waiting rooms of many doctor's offices.
Then a strange metamorphosis occurred.
The insurance companies were taking more than two-thirds
of our health care dollar.
The waiting rooms were full, but the dollar was going
somewhere else.
We needed to control the health insurance industry.
We didn't do it.
We still haven't done it.
The insurance companies frightened us with words like
"socialized medicine".
Other English speaking countries Great Britain and
Canada went to a single payer system.
This was done for one reason---to get the insurance
industry out of medicine.
Are we so ignorant that we can't see the problem?
My very successful Orthopedic surgeon has just returned to Canada.
He was "fed up" with our insurance bureaucracy
and he told me so.
He said he was tired of working for Blue Cross
and all the rest.
He said he just wanted to be a doctor----again.