Why not...?

It's like this in Canada and most of western Europe. Why not here?

...So-called healthy competition can only be possible in an environment where healthcare workers have strong unions and patients have strong consumer advocates fighting for their interests. Unions and advocacy groups are crucial to the American way of life. But currently, the situation in healthcare is different. HMOs all look the same, they all offer similar inefficient, ineffective, insincere products at a premium cost to the patients. To be sure, they are constantly decreasing what they pay to providers, but the savings goes into their own pockets, not back into the system. The term for this uniformly poor product is not competition but collusion. Expanding this private system to include the elderly and the infirm would be to expand the problem, not its solution.

The solution is to centralize healthcare under governmental control, where there is at least a basic health insurance available for all. The government bureaucracy may have many inefficiencies, but it nonetheless better serves the public than a corporation motivated strictly by profit. Patients are a large constituency and can, and should, influence re-election if the system is not going well.

Second: Prescription drugs should be covered for all elderly, but the first question that must be addressed is, At what cost? Many of these drugs are overpriced duplicates of one another. The government should not be asked to swallow these prices but should use the entire group of elderly as a cohort to force lower, more reasonable prices. This is the current system throughout much of Western Europe, and one of the main reasons drug prices are so much lower there.

I know this has been said before, but Dr. Marc Siegel, at The Nation, said it so passionately and articulately that I got all inspired again!

Complete column here.