How to solve the health care mess in America

Preface: The Dem plan was a disaster waiting to happen, thank goodness it looks like most provisions in it will not see the light of day.

Problem is health insurance. In order to solve the health care crisis in America we need to remove health insurance from all but catastrophic care. Insurance should be for major injuries or things like cancer only. All routine care should be paid via individuals directly.

The correct health care system of a nation must take basic cultural norms and attitudes into account. The right system for Europe is not the right system for America. America has free wheeling, dynamic, hyper individualist culture that has little time for sacrifice for the common good and negligible respect for restraint. Health insurance for routine care in this kind of culture is asking for disaster - and that's what we have got. In this kind of culture the thinking will be "I already had to pay, so how can I maximize what I get". The only escape valves we have from bankruptcy now are a) 45 million Americans have no health insurance and get little or no medical and b) people can be denied coverage or dropped if they get really sick. I do not mean to imply this is a good thing (it's not!) but it is what prevents national bankruptcy.

The biggest reason that cost of medecine is so high in America because of the notion that "someone else has to pay". In a hyper-individualistic culture rife with competition this is asking for trouble. If you are sick or injured in America and you have health insurance you want the best doctor, you want the best care and cost is not a factor. You want the newest tests with the most expensive machines. Europe and Japan have a kind of restraint that is lacking in the U.S. and more of a communal oriented mindset. There would be some guilt feelings about using to much medical care. In America we don't even know what the bill is so how could we even start to feel guilty.

We should change our system to reflect our values and pay routine costs out of pocket and have insurance only for catastrophic health problems.