[ArGee]

The system is broken, and it cannot be fixed until the problem of malpractice is fixed.

The system can not be fixed unless and until health care is put into the free market.

Let me buy my own health insurance and choose my own doctor. Let me pay my doctor and my insurance company reimburse me. Let my doctor choose his hospital and his own insurance policies.

And let some enterprising person or the state create a doctor rating Web site where the doctor's malpractice or bad practice or anything else becomes public information so I can make an informed decision.

Shalom.

[Savage Beast]

It won't work. As long as unlimited malpractice awards are possible, insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers cannot predict liability, and the entire health care system pays for this. It's like have a huge blank check hanging over the health care system, and you and I are required to pay, regardless of what amount is to be filled out on the check. The cost is unpredictable and enormous, and it overwhelms the system.

Unless and until this problem is solved, health care will remain unaffordable for everyone.

This is not an admonition. It is an observation and a prediction.

[Savage Beast]

If health care is put into the free market, without solving the problem of malpractice awards, insurance costs and defensive medical practices will continue to escalate and so, consequently, will health care costs, which you and I will have to pay.

Doctor ratings help some, but not enough to matter, because insurance companies and everyone else know that one slip-up, by the doctor with the purest record, could result in catastrophic malpractice payments.

If the government should take over the health care system, this conundrum will still exist. Government may cap awards. If the government indemnifies hospitals, doctors, etc., the system will still be unaffordable, and taxes will have to be raised time after time until the taxpayers revolt, as they did recently in California.

I'm not saying how to fix this problem. I am saying that unless it is fixed, the health care system cannot be fixed, and health care will remain unaffordable.