Health care for all, please.

What confuses me most about our system is the notion that the profit motive can be an effective motivator for someone to treat people that are sick, when the long-term goal of health care ought to be to prevent people from being ill in the first place. There's no incentive in our current system to do this (save general good will).

If you could structure the profit motive so that care-givers are rewarded for keeping people healthy (which is not the same as keeping them from seeking treatment, as many insurance companies seem to think), then a private system makes sense. Otherwise, single-payer seems the only sensible approach to the goal that I, at least, appear to share w/Scott: treat everyone regardless of ability to pay and don't bankrupt them while doing so.

If the insurance industry goes out of business in the process, that's too bad. At least while *they* are looking for work they won't get sick without being treated!

It was recently reported that more than 60% of bankruptcies are due to the debtors medical bills.  As far as I can tell from what was written about the study, this may not include those whose bankruptcies are caused more or less by failing to be treated adequately for addiction, which is in my experience a strong contributor to the bankruptcies I'm familiar with.

The simple truth is that until we solve the problem of people losing their credit worthiness, their livelihoods, and their homes because they cannot afford the illness they have contracted, we are wasting the talents and skills those people can contribute.

If you agree, please let your members of Congress hear from you.  Single-payer health care is being demonized as "socialized" medicine, and is thus being ignored.  But it is the only system that has a chance to prevent the kinds of tragedies that health-care related bankruptcies bring.  And it is the only system that has a chance of ending the absurdity of our system today: that there is a profit motive to have more sick people rather than fewer.