Dear Editor:
Bert Dirschell has shown the ability to find data supporting many of my opinions, but his comments about Bernie Sanders' Universal Health Care proposal fail to address our current problem, excessive and unsustainable health care costs.
Bert points out his provider's ER charge was nearly eight times more than Medicare would cover. My problem with our current "freedom of choice" system is that our total cost of health care for our nation is far and above that of nearly every other comparable world nation.
Let's face it, our hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical suppliers, insurance industry, media, and advertising agencies have done little to reduce health care costs. (By the way, this industry uses their income under our "freedom of choice" system to remind us with commercials how good our health care system is, or specifically, how well they are caring for us.) Neither political party nor any president in nearly 30 years has been able to successfully address this problem.
Comparing indexes for life expectancy, infant mortality and preventable deaths for some of our industrial competitors (France, Germany, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Australia, UK and Japan) show we fail to keep up. Our per capita expense for health care is 200 percent higher than any of these competitors. (Data from www.oecd.org)
This year our "freedom of choice" health care system costs this country about 18 percent of our GDP or one out of every six dollars produced in the U.S. Similar U.S. comps were 16 percent in 2008 and 13 percent in 2000. Please tell me how freedom of choice for health care is allowing this nation to keep up with our competitors.