Adding more children to the government dole is not going to help the health care system.

Physicians, hospitals, and clinics get reimbursed at rates lower than their expenses for

Medicaid (30% below costs), Medicare (10% below costs), and other programs (like SCHIP).

Several states don’t pay Medicaid for several months at a time, if at all.

Because of this, there are many areas where it is impossible to find a physician that will

accept Medicaid, and the number of physicians that accept Medicare and other government

programs is dwindling, as costs rise and reimbursements fall.

We need a two-tier health care system, as is the norm in most of the rest of the world:

1) a national network of state, county, and rural hospitals, clinics, and physicians

subsidized by the government (financially and with free electronic medical records and bulk

purchasing discounts) in exchange for accepting Medicare, Medicaid, and other government

programs (such as SCHIP)

2) a private network of hospitals, clinics, and physicians free to set their own rates in

order to recoup their costs, and free to negotiate with insurance companies for fair

reimbursements for services, instead of the current system (as in California) where

insurance companies can set their own arbitrary low rates and are protected by law in doing

so

If we don’t institute such a two-tiered system now, health care will continue to crumble.

This year.