Unfortunately, I doubt this will happen. For some reason, many Americans think that the way to save money in health care is to take away from the smallest piece of the pie: doctor's salaries. Making up 10% of health care costs, even if all doctors took a 50% pay cut (not going to happen, btw), that would lower health care costs a whopping 5%! Instead administrators, lawyers, health care company profits, and health care company executives who contribute nothing to the care of the patient make more than the doctor slaving away for 70 hours a week. They make up the other 90%. Sorry for the rant.

“AMA supports health system reform alternatives consistent with AMA principles of pluralism, freedom of choice, freedom of practice, and universal access for patients.”

We don’t yet know what form a final bill will take, which is why we will carefully study all options that make the system better for America’s patients and allow physicians to provide high-quality care. The AMA will stay actively engaged to get reform this year that improves the system for patients and physicians.

J. James Rohack, M.D.
President, AMA

But redistributing money is quite a different thing from being a service provider. That should be left to the private sector, because they do it better. Food is at least as critical an industry as health care, and our for-profit farmers and grocery stores meet our needs just fine, without prices spiraling relentlessly upward. If anything the system works too well. We've got so much cheap, delicious food we have an obesity problem.

We could use a little of that magic in health care. Let industry do what it does best and government do what it does best, and we'll swap our shortages of health care for the opposite problem: too much pampering, and too many ancient in-laws who can't seem to find their eternal rest.

Nationalize banks
Nationalize Auto Industry
Nationalize Healthcare

Good grief you sound like a democrat?? Opps sorry for the profanity

I specifically stated that it is in the field of health care where the social good conflicts with the levels of profits. In other businesses there is not as great a conflict. Maybe our retirement funds can invest in other places than the health care field.

Do you remember the word problems you had in junior high? Here’s one for you.
“If you spend $2 trillion per year providing healthcare for 254 million people, how much will you spend per year providing healthcare for 300 million people?……

Jim, that public companies do run those things is a fact. But that that constitutes a problem is an opinion, and a reasonably disputed one.

The upside of advertising is consumer choice. A system that doesn't offer consumers meaningful choices saves money on advertising, for sure. But if we're to benefit from real choices, advertising is essential. A choice you never find out about might as well not exist.

And I can give you three upsides to profit. First, it encourages innovation by giving people a financial incentive to do more with less. Second, when we're talking about profits of large publicly held companies, we're really talking about the returns on our retirement funds, and we like it when these go up. As a matter of fact, we're collectively pretty ruthless about evaluating mutual funds based on returns, so complaints about wicked the managers of these companies (whom we get to vote for, remember) are to focus on profit ring somewhat hollow.

The third advantage of profit is, paradoxically, loss. Companies that don't deliver more value to customers than they consumed in the attempt get shut down, within just a few years. So bad ideas get killed quickly. Contrast that with, say, a government program like the war on drugs, which has been devastating our most vulnerable communities for decades and shows no sign of being retired.

1. The incentives for doing procedures rather than treating conservatively must be taken away. Right now doctors are over-rewarded for procedures.

2. The legal climate must change. One reason there are too many tests and procedures is the threat of lawsuit if something is missed. Physicians have to be protected from lawsuits if they are following established algorithms. The inevitable result of doing less tests is missing an occasional problem.

3. Patient expectations must change. Every sprained ankle doesn't need an X-ray, every back ache doesn't need an MRI, just because you are tired doesn't mean you need $5000 of tests, etc, etc.

The reasons for over-spending are numerous and they all need to be addressed.

Your wisdom in your first paragraphs makes your proposed solution all the more surreal. Nationalized health-care amounts to a big government-run insurance company that wouldn't reduce costs either.

Jerry skipped the most telling bit of the article, that 60 Minutes moment when the reporter confronts the execs at Medicare's most egregiously overcharging hospital:

It was a depressing conversation—not because I thought the executives were being evasive but because they weren’t being evasive. The data on McAllen’s costs were clearly new to them. They were defending McAllen reflexively. But they really didn’t know the big picture of what was happening.

In other words, not only is our government-run health care program failing to control costs, it's not even bothering to mention to the most expensive providers that they're the most expensive.

Insurance, of any kind, its NOT the answer. Why, because insurance plans do nothing to address COST.

Cost is the principal problem. Healthcare in the U.S. costs far more than healthcare in ANY other country.
With an “insurance plan”, that trillion or two trillion will just go up!

There is no doubt that healthcare is a concern intrinsically important for our population. The cost of healthcare is to high because Demand is high. Demand will NEVER become less….NEVER. So does this mean that costs will never get smaller? YES IT DOES!

Nationalize the healthcare system over the next five years and END THIS PROBLEM FOREVER!

Good grief people its not like we breaking new ground. There are examples of nationalized healthcare everywhere in the world BUT HERE!