There are only two economic "ideas":  Capitalism to the right, and Communism to the left.  Every other economic system in the world is a compromise along the horizontal bar between those two ideas, and each such system is normally described as some form or degree of socialism.  The USA is capitalistic only in the sense that it is more to the right on that horizontal bar than any other major economic system.  Which means that the USA has compromised less than the others the idea of private captial (private ownership of income producing and non-income producing wealth).  The USA, and all of the countries in the EU, are models of the Keynesian philosphy (the government permits private ownership of wealth, but confiscates (taxes) and redistributes the income from such wealth to the benefit of the common good). To the degree that countries confiscate that income, they are said to be more or less "socialist".  

According to the OMB, the USA  now taxes all forms of income at about 32% of a $13 trillion economy and a GDP growth rate of 3.6%.   With the exception of Ireland and Denmark, EU countries providing national health care all tax above 55% and each has had an average GDP growth of less than 2% per year over the past seven years.  Countries like France and Germany have had years where the economy came close to deflating and the GNP growth was close to zero.

It is no small development, swept under the rug by the national health care proponents, that France is now threatening to pull out of the EU Central Bank unless that Bank grants France extraordinary control over the EU currency (the Euro).  Germany is in slightly better shape, but far from healthy.  High tax rates – caused partially by the costs of national health care – have been killing their economies.   

Nothing is for nothing, and the cost of providing adequate health care for 10 million American citizens must be paid somehow by someone – and it will come out of that $13 trillion one way or another.  I have read economists (a lot smarter than me) that say that if the cost is legislated by the state or federal government to be borne through our employer based health care system (similar to Workmans Comp) it could still have a chilling impact on GDP growth.  Maybe so.  Nevertheless, I would still feel more comfortable allowing private capital to adjust to that burden than having the federal government adjust to it.  The politicans would have the same never-ending solution.  Raise Taxes.

One of the great definitional problems I see here is that "uninsured" is made to equal "without access to care." Nothing could be further from the truth.

O the other hand, if many people are going without any medical care — that could indeed be a crisis for the society, but no one has demonstrated that this is the case.

I am sure your comments about fleecing people are heard far more with automobile insurance payouts – and are probably justified to the same degree.

"The hospital is for profit. It want's the most money for the least health care".  You really don't believe that.  What do you and franny123 have against profit? Permit me to suggest a different hospital mission statement.  "The hospital wants to offer the community it serves the best possible product at the lowest possible cost so as to provide the best return to its risk-taking investors."   No company, profit or non-profit, offering "the least" product, can expect to be around for very long.

Franny, franny, franny.  Understanding the size of the problem is helpful (actually essential) in designing a solution to the problem.  You will kill a lot more than the flea with a shotgun, and best not attack that elephant with a fly-swatter.  The 9 to 10 million uninsured Americans described in my previous post is one measure of the size of the problem, and has no meaning as to what is or is not acceptable in terms of suffering.  When was suffering in any amount ever acceptable?

It does have meaning in terms of the kinds and amounts of private (not public) resources that we have available to remedy the problem – and we have a bunch. When we understand that we are talking about providing adequate health-care to  less than 3% of our total population that has slipped through the cracks of our employer-based health care system, we can ask ourselves – What do we have in our system that can be used to remedy that? – and remedy it we must. Our economic system that advocates private ownership of all income-producing wealth has produced the worlds one and only $13 trillion economy – and counting, and the same private capital, employer-based health care system can solve this problem – without going socialist.  Don't knock profit as you seem to do.  Our private capital system has made us the wealthiest and most productive society ever.   It can be used to solve the health care problem, which can be solved at the federal level, or at the state level.  I personally prefer the state level. 

I used the example of state provided Workers Compensation Insurance as the general concept. WCI is to compensate workers unable to work due to job-related injury, much less complicated than health care.  Nevertheless, all employers with a certain number of employees must provide legislated levels of Workers Comp purchased from private insurance companies.  All employers with less than the certain number of employees must contribute a fixed amount for each employee into a state-wide pool, paid to the same private insurance companies and managed by the same private insurance companies.  No public funding. No government management. This has been going on for at least the last 40 years in all states, and it works just fine. This kind of thing could be adapted.

The anecdotal horror-stories you describe do little to solve the problem. I am sure your story is true, and I have no doubt there are many, many others just as horrible and just as true. The solutions through private investment are at hand – the problem is to get past the politics that want to use the problem to promote a much larger end-game – to Promote Big Government.

If my memory is correct, this was from BC, in the height of Greecian civilization. (Aristotle, maybe?)

At any rate, it sure seems to ring true.