One American for leaving health care alone

Somebody said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

I more or less agree with them, only I would say American health care is the worst in the world, except for all the others. Yes, it's expensive, but it's not necessarily the doctors and other health professionals who are making the money.

There are lots of reasons health care is so expensive, some of them reasonable, others not. There is the cost to the pharmaceutical industry of developing new drugs, a cost which is not incurred in other countries because they subsidize the cost of drugs to their citizens. There are expensive tests, some of them unnecessary. Trial lawyers. Cowardly insurance agencies who are hand in hand with the trial lawyers.

A young friend of mine is an obstetrician. She delivers babies. She works long hours and must be on call regularly in the evening, on weekends, and on holidays. After she pays for her share of support staff, taxes on her office, and $160,000 in malpractice insurance, she earns about as much as she would in a part-time job at Target.

It's the guys like John Edwards (he of the two Americas, who owns the biggest house in South Carolina) who get a large portion of the money. Lawsuits by lawyers like him suck up everything. If there were no malpractice insurance these piranhas would have to go to work at honest jobs. But the trial lawyers are good buddies with the Democrats, so nothing is going to be done about them by the current administration.

No-one will discuss this topic without prefacing it with a shamefaced admission that health care needs reform. The most uncaring capitalist who grinds the faces of the poor and keeps his cash in overseas accounts has to take the oath that health care must be reformed.

I say bosh. I say piffle. I am constituting myself as a party of one person who does not believe that health care needs to be reformed. And yes, I don't believe in climate change. I hate endangered species and don't believe carbon dioxide is poisonous. Or that animals have rights.

Furthermore, I believe our country is the greatest one that ever existed. Second is Great Britain, from which we derived our system. The rest of the pack are far behind.