What opponents to government health care constantly forget is that you're already paying for the uninsured. It's just not up front and in your face. Instead it's in $5.00 wooden tongue depressors that the hospital has to charge because they have to treat so many uninsured people that, to make a profit, they have to gouge everyone.

The other hidden cost is the number of people that end up much sicker than they ever would because of no access to preventative measures and first line actions. The cost to treating someone with mild bronchitis early on before severe pneumonia kicks in and causes hospitalization is a mere fraction of the final bill. If our country provided free birth control pills to anyone needing them, imagine the number of women that would not have childbirth complications, one of the larger drains on our health dollars.

It would be folly to provide government health care without requiring responsibility on the part of the users of such services. Obese citizens would be required to take classes in weight management before they could get care for the ailments their extra weight caused. Smokers would be required to enroll in anti-smoking classes to continue benefits related to respiratory or smoking-related illnesses. Citizens coming in for drug-related problems would be required to go into drug counseling.

The ultimate goal of any program would have to be relieving average Americans of the devastation of catestrophic illness and injury. Give incentives for the ones that abuse the system by constantly showing up for a hangnail the onus of paying a reverse sliding scale based on the severity of the complaint. The more trivial the final resolution of their problem, the more the copay. You could even base that formula on the repetitiveness of their visits.

Any system has to have both compassion and hard choices. There is no other successful way. For those of you that are well-off enough to provide your own health care insurance, I see no reason why your wealth could not supplement the government system for your own regal care.

It sounds socialistic but in reality it's simply accepting the realities of life. We're all paying for it already. Why not put some structure to it?

Art