Most industrialized nations get better results than we do, and for far less money, because they control costs. We not only don’t do that, we’ve even written failure to control costs into law: Congress has prohibited price negotiations between government health-care agencies and “big pharma” for medications. In the cases of commonly-prescribed prescription drugs, this is a multi-Billioni-dollar gift to pharmaceutical companies, and at consumer (i.e., taxpayer) expense.

It won’t happen in my lifetime, but if we want to avoid – and we OUGHT to avoid – a health care scenario in which 3 or 4 huge companies monopolize and set prices for what is not, and never has been, a “free market,” we should scrap the ACA and put in its place a single-payer, government-run health care system based on Medicare and Social Security. Health care providers – individual (i.e., doctors and nurses) and institutional (i.e., hospitals and clinics) ought to either run directly by the government, with those who deliver health care being civil service government employees, or closely and relentlessly-monitored private entities subject to government scrutiny, with criminal penalties for fraudulent claims and fraudulent billing, among other things.

Health care ought to be, like education, street paving, clean water, and numerous others, a public service provided by people that we elect, not a profit-driven corporate enterprise wherein prices and costs are both hidden from the public which pays the bills.