Thoughts on healthcare

I'm currently being bombarded by pleas for grassroots participation in events whose goal is to cut through the misinformation cloud that's being perpetuated by those that wish to derail or at least entangle the health care reform effort. When is the health care reform legislation agenda going to stop shifting around, so I can contribute informed and specific support instead of blind support for this nebulous notion of "the system need reform, but on Tuesday it's going to have a public option, on Wednesday it's going to be a coop-based system, etc"? I strongly support a government-run single-payer system with regulated costs. I also support a branch of the health care system that is exempt from that regulation but is also not covered by the public insurance, to allow a space for continued innovation and profit. I envision something like this:

Company X develops a new technique for robotic surgery. The new machines that are the result of that research are manufactured and sold into the hospitals that chose not to opt into the public health system's patient pool. The procedures that use these machines are performed at those hospitals (at prices comparable to today's insanity) until they've developed a usage history and a few years of profit-taking. Then those machines are sold into the public health system hospitals at a fixed (regulated) profit margin with respect to the actual manufacturing costs. Rinse, repeat.

I would gladly pay increased tax dollars to make this happen.

I'm not against the concept of people with $$ being able to spend it on getting the best cutting-edge health care available. I am against a system where that's the only option; i.e. people without $$ are unable to get access to base-level health care and technology that's been around for years without being completely leveled financially.

Net Neutering Reality