A comparison of Texas and Illinois shows Texas has a little more than four times the area and twice the population. Texas is a red as any state and Illinois is bluer than most. Both states have large cities which are much more liberal than the rural parts of their state. Texans’ revenue comes mostly from the sale of fossil fuel which means they are awash with money now. Back a few decades ago when oil was around ten dollars a barrel Texas was destitute because they don’t have an income tax. Illinois has a moderate income tax which often fails to balance its budget.

            A huge difference between the two states is health care. Illinois is awash with medical facilities. It seems as if every little community has doctors and a clinic or two. Even small towns have a hospital. Few Illinoisans live farther than a half hour from a hospital. Texas on the other hand has hospitals in large cities and some small cities. Many of their larger towns have a hospital with limited capabilities. They are without a full time maternity ward or even an ER staff with maternity knowledge. Several million Texans must drive for hours to get to full service hospital.

            The statistics show that those red states have spent less on health care services and on Medicaid than blue states. The red states policies are why the United States is so “high” on deaths of new mothers. The numbers per hundred thousand births for Germany is 4, Canada is 8, the U.K. is 9 and the U.S. is 24 with over 60,000 estimated near deaths because we don’t track that in the red states.

            Blue states seem to really care more for women’s health.

We are told the United States has the very best medical system in the world. We don’t! It is the most expensive by any measure. Tens of millions are not only not covered by employer insurance, millions have none including Medicaid. Millions have no access to a doctor because they can’t afford it or live too far from any clinic or doctor’s office.

The administration is pushing vaccines from American companies when the best and closest to being utilized is the one from Oxford University and made by AstaZeneca, a French company. While others were testing on baboons and monkeys, Oxford was testing on hundreds of people. They started on tens of thousands around the world while our administration pushes making vaccines and skipping large number testing. Oxford’s produces anti-bodies and T-cells which may be permanent verses the American vaccines which have lower effectiveness and no T-cells requiring many shots. Trump says he (meaning tax money) will pay for the first one. We will pay for the rest.

More than two centuries ago Spain’s King Carlos learned a cow pox vaccination prevented small pox which killed hundreds of thousands of Europeans each year. He had all of his subjects in Spain quickly protected and using a novel system everyone; white, brown, or black, in his colonies were protected. Twenty orphans shipped across the Atlantic were infected on a two by two basis so the cow pox survived. It was repeated across the Pacific. Most of the world was free a century before we were declared free in 1949.

Most of the developed world beats us in cost and results. Many insurance companies are sending their insured to other countries for operations and recovery. It is cheaper, has better results, and is quicker.

It is time billionaires quit compromising our care!

Steve Brill wrote a very extensive article in the March, 2013 issue of Time on Health Care in America. I can’t think of any other industry that rips off Americans as much as the pharmaceutical industry. Other countries negotiate and get greatly reduced prices for their people. Congress has passed laws prohibiting the Medicare and Medicaid from trying to lower prices like the V.A.

The factories (often in foreign countries) make the pills for pennies and then sell it for thousands of percent mark up. Every week brings another news item of a drug that was a dollar a pill and now a hundred dollars or a new Medicine costing $35,000 – $75,000 a year. Ever wonder what a European or Canadian will pay?

The ACA was a good first step and the AHCA kept some of the good, but got rid of some of the things the poor needed and cut expenses for the rich.

The critics of ACA and Medicare say the programs are too costly to the government. The ACA’s insured are sick and/or older but not 65. The younger healthy people don’t sign up to balance the costs.

Many people and think tanks have found our current mish-mash is the reason so many other countries’ citizens are healthier than we are.

By covering the healthy kids, young adults, middle-agers, and seniors, the flat cost to everyone balances the programs income and expenses. It could be adjusted up or down to make it revenue neutral. Additional private insurance could be purchased by each individual at the level of coverage they want. The poor might not be able to afford expensive private coverage and the rich could buy complete coverage.

Two more criteria: our government would not pay any more than other governments, and doctors and hospitals would cost what the local living standard requires.

While Congress toys with our healthcare almost all of us can only hope for the best. The rest of the industrial countries solved the insurance and healthcare for their people years ago. Only one of the many people I have talked to from the U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Brazil, and Columbia would want our system. Most had our free market cockeyed, hodgepodge medical system before fixing it with a sensible plan.

Americans spend $2.8 trillion on it each year or $1 of every $6 of our GDP. That’s more than the next ten countries combined! What do we get for all that money? We get higher rates of disease, shorter life expectancy, and a rating of 50th in infant mortality. The majority of bankruptcies are caused by the inability to pay medical bills.

Fewer people every year are covered by private insurance through their employers. More people are covered by Medicaid and Medicare and ultimately taxpayers.

Every president since FDR has tried to solve the problem. The ACA was a poor, quick compromise. The recently defeated AHCA plan was big on reducing the taxes for the rich and reducing benefits for the poor.

A fair plan is to lower Medicare to birth and everybody pay $100 per month for what benefits seniors get. Additional insurance can be purchased to cover deductibles. It would solve the healthcare problems and fix the budget shortfall on healthcare.

That will never happen because there’s too much money being made with today’s mesh-mash system! Think that is why the rich live a longer, happier life? Trickle-down economics means a trickle for healthcare!