Health Care- The Festering Cancer Sucking the Life out of America

Who likes having tons of money taken out of their paychecks each month so that some insurance executives can buy a 60-foot yacht for each coastal state? Sometimes it feels like we ought to just line up on payday to give a quarter of our paycheck to some bloated greasy executive in a $2000 suit, who can then quickly dispatch us with a swift kick to our collective hind-sides. Now that's medical care, right?

Please don't misunderstand me. By no means am I positing that social medicine is the way to go. I lived in Germany for two years and I saw what happens under social medicine. No where else have I ever seen as many people with preventable developmental limb defects, chronic diseases that could have been treatable had they been caught early enough, and general bad attitudes (okay, this isn't a medical condition and is probably a product of the fact that I was there as a missionary, preaching religion and faith to the heathen). Mind you all these problems were in Germany, which, as far as quality of care in social medicine goes, is probably near the top of the list.

So what can we do with the throbbing pus-ball that is American health care without resorting to an even worse system? Do we have to sacrifice quality of care for the sake of cost?

Here's an idea: change health care (insurance) from a business to a service - like it should be. Capitalism is great, but it has figured out a lot of ways of screwing the American populace; health care is a prime example of this. Taking the business out of health care would mean our health care executives would have to find some other way to swindle the American public- is the oil industry hiring?

So here's how we can do it. As it is right now, we pay tens of thousands of dollars so that we're "covered" in case of an accident. When that accident happens (or disease, or child-birth, or whatever the medical necessity happens to be), how hard do we have to fight to get just a little bit of that money back? Why not set up personal savings-type accounts that we pay into each month, and when we need that money...VOILA! You've got it saved away. Think about it, if you saved $200 a month (pretty cheap compared to modern health insurance), you could save $24000 in ten years to be put toward medical expenses, and that's without the interest you would accrue in the meantime. With all that money going into the economy instead of the insurance executives' pockets, this kind of plan might actually help the economy, instead of putting a drain on it.

I should make the disclaimer that this is not an original idea on my part; I've heard similar ideas many times, most recently from my friend Marissa. However, I think this would be a great way to "fix" health care. Now obviously it wouldn't solve all of our problems- nothing will. However, by taking the greedy corporations out of the picture, we can cut out a lot of the fat and end up with a trim, healthy way of providing good quality health care to a greater number of people at a lower cost. That's me just saving the future of America one problem at a time.