National Health Care

Actually a lot of people choose not to have health care. The bulk of people who are legal citizens or aliens without healthcare coverage also happen to be between 18 and 25 years of age. The time in people's lives where short of a catastrophic accident, they tend not to need even a doctors visit. It is also the time in people's lives where they get starter jobs and have other priorities to pay for such as housing or taking a cue from Tommy, beer money.

The 40 odd million uninsured that keeps getting bandied about is made up of between 10 and 15 million illegals, 20 odd million young adults, and 10 million people who could truely be considered to be without health care due to economics or chronic conditions that make it impossible to get private insurance.

If you want to fix health care...

1 Institute a mandatory insurance pool for otherwise omitted pre-existing chronic disease.

2. Replace the current medicare/medicaid payment system with one that pays net 15 days, pays the actual cost of procedures, and criminalizes abuse by both patient and provider in cases of fraud with draconian mandatory prison terms.

3. In cases of illegals receiving health care, if they are incapable of paying allow for direct confiscation of material property owned by the patient and or property of the family as well as subtract the cost of unrecovered treatment expenses from any and all Federal aid sent to a foreign country.

If you do those 3 things healthcare would effectively cover the 10 million people who need it but cannot get it. It would solve the problem of private insurance subsidizing the unrecovered expenses of Medicare/Medicaid. And would eliminate the current drain of funds from most large hospitals as a result of treating illegal aliens.

It doesn't take a National Healthcare plan to solve these problems. And if you did enact a National Health Plan as offered by Obama, it specifically does not address these three problems and potentially exacerbates problems 2 and 3.