If we want Medicare to work we are going to have to raise Medicare taxes and premiums.

[TreasonousBastard]

34. Since the UN and other organization consistantly rate France...

as having the best healthcare on the planet, I would assume your system works a bit better than ours.

We have some unique problems and situations I suspect you don't. First, medical school leaves our new doctors at least a quarter million in debt, usually more. There is no adequate method of reducing the debt, or the school cost, for most of them so they tend to head first for dermatology and then the other higher paying specialties. Primary care physicians are pretty much the bottom of the pay scale, so we're looking at shortages there, since hardly anyone is signing up. Lots of Indian doctors find primary care an entry into US healthcare since no one else wants it.

The "whole patient" concept is excellent, and much like doctors used to work until things became so complicated we needed specialists. More people are being healed since the specialists are so good, but a lot is being lost when nobody is "in control" of the patient's healing. And more money, much more money, is spent.

MRIs are an interesting case-- here doctors groups and hospitals have set up MRI, and/or Radiology, Centers that are profit centers and demand lots of patients at high prices. Dialysis and other procedures are also done this way, often a local monopoly with no effective cost controls, other times excessively competing, but rarely with any cost competition. The end result is that they are done too often and too expensively.

Another curious thing is the concept of doctors having privileges at specific hospitals but not others. In my mother's case, her favorite doctor, who also happens to be the house doctor at her facility, is not admitted in the best hospital in the area. When she was rushed to the best hospital in the area because of heart palpitations, the team there redid all the tests and created a new history when the other hospital and her regular doctor had all that on file. Cost quite a bit for all that unnecessary testing.

There's more, but some other time.