This Alternet article gives the facts behind America's bloated, inefficient, and second rate (well actually seventeenth rate - or worse) healthcare system. And it makes the point that our system is focused on sickness not on health because a healthy population isn't profitable. Nothing new there - I knew most of it and I haven't even seen Sicko yet.

However its link to employment figures is interesting - it points out that the explosion in healthcare spending which is the reason for the explosion in healthcare costs to Joe Public, has been the driving force behind the explosion in healthcare employment. So guess what happens if you throw out the inefficient private healthcare system and put in one that is efficient and centrally managed by a single payer? Well you'll get massive unemployment in the healthcare sector because a business that spends six times what other countries spend on administration is clearly going to need far fewer employees - and that, as Bush would say, is "bad for the economy".

So America, you're going to have to continue to suffer because no government wants to sit by as hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers lose their jobs and ruin their unemployment statistics. Can you imagine the battles with unions that will happen if the squeeze on these bloated HMOs ever comes along? Never mind that it might be good for the health of the rest of us, never mind that it would save us hundreds of billions, and never mind that its what works for every other developed nation.

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