Ok – I agree that we overspend and don’t prioritize our purchases (thank you credit cards). All you have to do is look at the mortgage crisis to see the impact of the “I want it now/credit society” combined with personal seller profit without any industry regulation. However, I could argue that our societial lack of personal economic decision making is exactly why we should have national healthcare. If individuals don’t know how to prioritize purchases, then maybe someone else needs to do it for them. I believe healthcare is a right in a civilized society not a privilege. What type of society do you think we’ll have when more people do not have healthcare than have it? Even if you think we should continue with our personal pay healthcare system, what about all the loopholes? When I went to the emergency room for an allergic reaction, it cost $2,000 to receive an IV of benadryll (Tom/spelling?). I was told it was so expensive because so many people without healthcare go to the emergency room for everyday care because emergency rooms cannot turn someone away due to affordability. Don’t you think a lot of the people who aren’t honest have found a way to get healthcare coverage without paying? Who do you think is paying for them? Don’t you think we already have a form of national healthcare? However, do you know who is really being hurt by this? Honest middle income Americans who don’t have healthcare but who do take personal responsibility and do not “work” the system. How did we get here? We went from a society where we didn’t have much healthcare readily available to us (medical advances/mobility/communication systems etc) to a society where science has dramatically increased quantity of life beyond quality. So now we have to make moral decisions as to when to shorten quantity. Who has the right to shorten the quantity? During the industrial age, we decided that it would be a good idea to shift the medical cost responsibility to industry. This worked when most people worked in industry and stayed there for their whole life. Now we no longer work at one large company our whole life. We can no longer spread the cost of medical insurance across a large number of diversed aged people who all work at that same company. Companies can no longer take a long range view for profits. They’re being driven by stock market prices that are increasingly short-term in nature because the stock owners are not vested in the long-term only in tomorrow’s stock price. Employees are no longer long-term investments but bottom line expenses. When companies can’t reduce the employee numbers any longer, they reduce their costs by shifting company expenses to the employees. … So we’re no longer in the industrial age. We’re no longer a country of long standing corporate employees. So should we still have personal healthcare coverage tied to employers? Seems that we currently do … kind of/in theory. Seems it currently isn’t working. Is this really the fault of personal overspending? I don’t think so.

I will end this with the wonderfully upbeat long winded reply with another wonderful national ticking timebomb. Boomer and beyond retirement savings. Now that we’ve cut the industry tie for retirement savings (bye bye pensions). How many people do you think have realized that their parents retirement which was funded by their parent’s company pension will not be there for them? If people can’t stop their short-sighted impulse spending to pay for their current healthcare needs, how can they be expected to stop their short-sighted impulse spending to pay for their way off in the future retirement needs? How many elections before the main topic is nationalized retirement income? How long before desperate boomers (etc) start to want to legalize euthanasia (hello inheritance – remember quanity vs quality)? Where is this all heading?

Thankfully, I still have great faith in the American economy and American ingenuity and adaptability. I don’t know where we’re heading or when we’ll be there but I still believe we’ll figure it out.

Tom – have a field day with this one.

Yup, that is my future Northwestern grad ….