Yes, and addressing much of the rest of what you said as well...

Disease does (sort of) happen randomly. But that does not mean that it can't be caused though. Some people get lung cancer for no known reason. But we know that if you smoke you are much more likely to get it. And some smokers live to be very old with no obvious health effects from smoking.

Some people get in car accidents. We know that driving fast increases the risk of accidents. Some people drive very fast and never have or cause an accident. Yet we charge people for driving fast, for exposing others to the risk, by giving them traffic tickets. Let's give people health tickets for risky behaviors that drive up costs for everyone.

I don't like the idea that people are forced to buy insurance. I don't think the "reform" passed last year is perfect. But it is something. I'm not sure I would have voted for it but I think the attacks of it are just plain vindictive and idiotic. People who don't buy health insurance when they can afford it are stupid! They need to either be force to do it, forced to pay if they get sick, or allowed to die. As much as I don't like the "nanny government" I also see people every day buying a couple of packs of cigarettes at $5 a pop ($300/month) then saying they can't afford health insurance at the same price.

This country (the USA) spends something like 17% of GDP on health care. Simply reducing that a little by improving overall health and making the system more efficient would solve the problem! I'm not a health nut or fitness fanatic. I could lose a few pounds and probably eat way too many potato chips.

But I have no doubt that if we simply improved the diet and exercise habits of Americans a little bit and cut back on health care bureaucracy a tiny bit as well, the savings would be enormous!

Health care costs are our biggest expense. I agree with the above comments and also would like to add that I think they diagnose 'disability' too easily and quickly. I am partly biased, I have a daughter who cannot talk, feed, dress or bathe herself. she will need care for the rest of her life. She does not receive disability benefits but I've seen others (who do perfectly well at life skills) who do. We were not guaranteed a perfect life and I'm not sure we (as a society) should rush in to supplement when a minor aspect goes wrong. (Again, I'm biased as we have always been turned down for disability for her).

I also have an issue with how stupidly insurance companies work. They will deny preventative care but cover fully once things are critical. I can't wait on critical for my daughter - so we pay quite a bit for preventative.

I'm of the same feelings about disability. I have friends who are "disabled" but have as good or better computer skills than most IT professionals since they spend all day long on their computer.....but they can't work because they are "disabled". In that situation, I'd call their "disability" a severe case of laziness.

We are in a shifting healthcare landscape and things won't be settled for some time to come. Interestingly enough, the NY Times came out with an article on that very subject yesterday.

Whatever Court Rules, Major Changes in Health Care Likely to Last

As a healthcare professional who has watched the wanton waste of the "healthcare" machine for a few years now, its going to require a huge cultural change. Tort reform, doing away with fee-for service entirely in the industry, sweeping medicare/medicaid changes, and either socialized insurance or promoting competition in private health insurance as mentioned earlier will all be needed, but ultimately, the problem with healthcare comes from the same cultural problem that led us into this massive national debt. Expecting a level a service that far exceeds what we are willing to pay for. I heard a stat last night on PBS that the average senior on medicare right now paid in ~$150,000 into medicare and will extract ~$450,000 from it over the course of their lifetime. Much of that spending will be in the last year of life. An honest conversation about what we can reasonably expect to pay for as far as end of life care will go a long way towards reducing our total healthcare costs. If you look up the numbers, it is staggering. There are still many other problems as mentioned previously, but the largest target to focus on, if you could get by the political rhetoric (granny death panels), is costs of end of life care. Of course, I am saying this as a 26 year old man, not a 86 year old man and I may think differently then .

Oh and if you guys had any idea how much money we spend on people who get bit by snakes, you would flip your lids. A treatment of CroFab costs ~$20,000-$60,000 depending on how large you are and how fast you respond. No one in the history of my hospital has just gotten randomly bit by a snake while they were walking around.

They are ALWAYS (ie: universal truth):

1. Drunk or on drugs
2. Doing something stupid
3. On medicaid

ALWAYS.

They inevitably leave AMA (against medical advice) because we won't let them smoke or dip in their rooms too.

But insurance usually does not cover snake bite treatment. So I suspect the hospital gets stuck with the bill one way or another.

I've heard that in most cases the sentence that immediately precedes a rattlesnake bite is "Hold my beer and watch this."

There are clearly a lot of serious problems in our system. I for one think it is terrible and ultimately destructive that doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals who work hard, study, spend big on their education, work hard, and genuinely care about their patients are squeezed and don't make that much money in the scheme of things while huge insurance companies that do nothing but process paper are rewarded.

We need the paper pushers at some level. But the free-market has produced a highly distorted "value chain" that I personally think can only be fixed by government intervention. I'm not a fan of big government in most cases but when the market fails and the service is critical, that's when you need government to step in.

Of course, these yahoos we have now are so inept that they can't even solve a relatively simple problem. I don't think they could ever handle something as complex as health care.