Our Healthcare  "System"

For ya'll that don't follow healthcare or don't quite understand how it works in this country, our healthcare system is actually a smorgasbord of systems rolled into one cluster-youknowwhat.  According to a healthcare lecture I attended, the US has: private insurance (mostly) through employers (aka Socialized Health Insurance like in Germany); the state health system like the UK (care to the military, the VA system and to Native Americans); national health insurance similar to the Canadian system (Medicare for the aged and Medicaid for the poor, disabled or lucky) and out-of-pocket financing like the system they have in Cambodia and other non-developed nations (for young, working folks who don't think they need insurance or can't afford it).

Two headlines from my "AMA Morning Rounds" e-mail 

'Fewer doctors accepting new Medicaid patients.'

If we move to a system where everyone is compulsorily "insured," and where everyone has equal coverage (does redistribution of wealth/resources ever work out fairly?), and where the fruits of one man's labor becomes another man's 'right,' doctors might even stop accepting patients who are have so-called private (but highly government-regulated) "insurance."  When wages don't justify the work, doctors will eitheproviding services quit or demand payment for services in cash.

'North Carolina to issue preferred drug list for Medicaid patients.'

This headline is an example of a concept called care-rationing, whereby a finite medical resource is divvied by the government.  Bureaucrats, not physicians, decide who may have what treatment and when.