Who to point to for health-care reform?

I was listening to the radio on my drive home yesterday evening and heard an interesting sound bite while the dial was turned to the local National Public Radio station.
It was President Obama talking somewhere about his health reform bill. The president made a statement in reaction to Republican complaints about his bill.
“You had 10 years to do something,” Obama spoke of Republicans to the crowd.
Say what you want about Obama and the Democrats’ proposal to overhaul the health care and insurance industries in this country, but President George W. Bush and Republicans were in office for long enough to have acted if they wanted to.
Unless Congress acts before April 1, payments to doctors for treating Medicare patients will drop by more than 21 percent. The argument from doctors is they will stop seeing Medicare patients because they will spend more money treating them than they get reimbursed.
But Congress has done nothing but delay cuts in physician payments for more than 10 years. That dates back to the Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress.
Reader comments from my story today want to blame Obama for the Democrats plan for the potential ruin of health care.
If health care in this country goes to Hell in a hand basket, you shouldn’t blame Obama-care and Democrats. Sitting on your hands and doing nothing is just as bad taking action and messing up.

Health care spending in the U.S.

It’s hard to turn on the evening news or a cable news network this week and not hear something concerning President Obama’s health-care reform.
There are strong opinions on either side of the issue, but the fact still remains that something needs to be done to correct the amount of money the U.S. spends medicine.
Health care represented 17 percent of this country’s gross domestic product in 2007, according to the National Coalition on Health Care. That was $2.4 trillion or $7,900 per person.
In 2008, health expenditures were expected to rise twice the rate of inflation, the coalition said.
Is that not a problem?
Forget about covering the millions of uninsured in this country. The U.S. needs a paradigm shift on its attitudes toward health care spending.
Jamie Orlikoff, a leading health care consultant, spoke at Baptist St. Anthony’s Hospital in late November and gave a powerful talk on the problems facing U.S. health care.
That night, he likened the U.S. spending on health care to the Soviet’s spending on its military.
“Health care is bankrupting the economy,” Orlikoff told select medical, civic and hospital leaders. “We’re spending too much on health care.”
Orlikoff threw some sobering statistics at the crowd:

• In 2006, U.S. spending on health care would have created the third-largest economy in the world.


• By 2015, nearly 1 of every 5 dollars spent in the U.S. will be on health care.


• While fighting two wars in the Middle East, the U.S. still spends four times more on health care than the military.


• The Medicare program will be bankrupt in the next decade, government reports say if nothing is done to correct the program.

I read one op-ed piece this morning that stated, “Is it a problem that the United States has almost four times as many MRI scanners per capita as Canada does?”
Yes. Depending on how often they are used in individual communities.
If you have a dozen MRI machines in a square mile and each is only use sparingly, then why force consumers to pay for a multi-million dollar MRI machine when offices could consolidate their use?
It flies in the face of reason, but in health care, bigger is not always better and the newest, most advanced technology is not always needed for quality health care.