Way To Go, Congress!

Just thinking... in all the discussion during the last few weeks about reforming the US healthcare system, and grand proposals for creating new programs and enrolling the 45 million or so Americans who currently have no health insurance -- as good and noble an objective as that may be -- there is one teeny little question: Who, exactly, is going to take care of all these people? Real doctors? Where are we going to find them? Have they been kept in a secret reserve pool somewhere until now? Because, unless I'm missing something, there aren't a lot of extra primary care doctors sitting around at Starbucks, waiting for patients.

And while we're on the subject, how are we going to fix that other little medical program sponsored by the US government for the last 44 years or so...I think it's called Medicare or something like that. Last I heard, it was running out of money because no one seemed to have a clue how to fix it. Something about more money going out than coming in, lots of talk about fraud, waste, and abuse, but nobody ever seems to be able to put their finger on all that fraud, waste, and abuse in order to fix it. Lots of talk, but no solutions.

But that's okay. I'm sure that a brand new, hugely-expensive, government-sponsored healthcare system would absolutely not have any of the same problems that all of the other hugely-expensive government-sponsored programs in the history of the universe have had. I'm completely sure that suddenly deciding to enroll another 45 million people in some kind of government-sponsored health program would be highly efficient, assure the highest quality of care, and would have absolutely none of the chronic structural problems of Medicare that no administration in the last 40 years has been able or willing to solve.

And most importantly, I rest easy at night knowing that within the huge surplus of extra primary care physicians we have sitting around, looking for work, most of them will step up immediately to spend more time, doing more work, with less autonomy, for even less money than they might otherwise have to settle for, taking care of Medicare patients.

Way to go, Congress!