Like most bloated costs, most can be attributed to inefficiency and over regulation. Many of the mandates in 0bamacare demanded changes that were financially burdensome to providers. On a side note, the electronic requirements re: documentation have lead to massive identity theft and fraud, exact opposite of what was intended. That's a topic that deserves a thread of its own, it's been so bad. Another unintended consequence of having non-expert politicians dictate policy for an industry they don't understand.

Providers should always be profitable. Without it, not only can they not survive, but we cannot continue to be leaders of healthcare innovation.

That's the balance that needs to be struck. But by no means are providers taking too much profit. They are being saddled with too high costs before they cut in to profit.

Coupled with the fixed pricing reimbursement, and you have a system that is ripe for fraud. You can get about anything covered as long as it's "coded right" on the form. And, doctors can (and routinely do) encourage unnecessary care because they will be reimbursed, or... they feel it necessary so they aren't sued for lack of care. Much to clean up in that arena as well.

As most take their myopic look at healthcare, spinning incessantly on about enigmatic buzzwords like so-called "access," they miss the larger influencer of healthcare in our country - health itself.

Simply put... we're very unhealthy, which requires more care. Our diet is horrible, filled with foods that are inflammatory and diabetes-causing processed oils, grains, and sugars, and other unhealthy processed foods. In this sense, the health debate converges with the climate debate in that most engaging in the issue completely miss the forest for the trees. Our healthcare issue is driven by our poor health, just as the climate non-issue is driven by the activity of the sun. For both topics, we're addressing the wrong things and ignoring the causes. There's no policy that could possibly address either when most don't even recognize the drivers of those topics.

That's why both get mostly lip service, and the "solutions" that are implemented generally cause more problems and solve nothing at all.

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