Did you hear the news that the waiting time to see a doctor has shot up for heart attack patients needing emergent care? This presumably because of long wait times at hospitals due to other emergency rooms closing.

And that's partly because so many uninsured people use emergency rooms for every level of care.

The number of uninsured Americans rose for the sixth consecutive year in 2006, to 47 million according to Census data released on August 28. And about one in three of us now hassles with HMOs. (Try staying in the hospital until you are truly ready to come home and see how much enthusiasm you can generate from your insurer on the subject.)

Forty seven million!? Our total population is around 300 million, so that means about one in six of us lacks health insurance and another huge number of us are haggling to get the care promised to us by companies trying to wiggle out of agreements via every loophole imaginable. But go to Canada or France or England and everybody's covered and their prescription medications are available for a reasonable cost. We don't want Socialism here, we say. Yet we have no problem with free schools, free military protection, free roads...

Okay, yes, our taxes pay for those things. So let's think about what it might cost us to raise taxes, provide universal health care, and get rid of the whole "for profit" thing. Recently we got an estimate of what it would cost us to buy private insurance to cover our family of three. To keep the same level of coverage we have now (which is great, but still meant we paid more than six grand out of pocket for my hip/shoulder surgeries in the past two years), we'd have to pay fifteen hundred bucks per month. I'm thinking we could raise taxes by a lot less than that number and still have better care and coverage than we, the fortunate insured, received. (Add to that the fact that my endocrinologist does not take insurance at all. So I pay 100 percent out of pocket every time I see him. And the doc who operated on me is not in my "plan," but then, none of the ortho trauma docs who practice out of my "in plan" hospital are "in plan," so I had no choice...)

Now, have you checked out the level of compensation most healthcare CEO's are making? And consider this announcement made in November 2007: "Kaiser Permanente has reported that its Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and subsidiaries saw dramatic increases in its net income, operating income and investment income over the last three and nine months, with nine month profits more than doubling." Hmmm.

Back when I was an infertility patient, I needed some injectible medications. They cost $4,000 per month here. The same meds cost about $50 in France and Mexico. So some of the members of our support group found legal ways to obtain these meds for less, and the pharma company found out. They issued warnings to our members stating that they were in danger of getting meds without necessary FDA packaging info (so what?). So I did some research and found that all the meds going to the U.S. and Canada and France were made at the same factory--in Belgium. It was the same stuff. (A local doc even tested samples and verified it was all the same.) When I talked with the pharma company rep to ask for the reason behind the price difference, here's what she told me: In America we have to pad the price to cover the cost of law suits.

You know what's really sad about that? That same company did get slapped with a suit in 2005 that cost them $704 million. And you know why they got sued? Because they paid kickbacks to docs who prescribed an AIDS medication that didn't work as claimed. They got sued because of their own unethical practices that ripped off some of the most vulnerable patients!

Pure greed.

Did you hear about the 9/11 rescue workers who developed serious respiratory issues, but their insurance companies refused to allow what they needed so to get proper care they had to go to...Cuba?

I wish I were making this up.