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No! Going to a socialized medical system like they have in Europe will decrease the availability of health care and reduce the quality.

We cannot succumb to this entitlement mentality that says everything is a 'right.' This view of the world is why so many of the rich Europeans and Canadians come to the US for cancer treatment and major surgeries. In fact, earlier this year a high-ranking member of the Canadian government, on the advice of her doctor, went to California to have surgery for her breast cancer. Why? Because the waiting time in Canada is much too long. By the time she'd get the necessary surgery under the socialized system, the cancer might be too far along to be dealt with effectively.

This shows how socialized medicine can kill you. If you have not seen it, I highly recommend the recent John Stossel ABC News special titled Whose Body is it Anyway. Stossel does an excellent job in showing the flaws in socialized medicine. One of those flaws is that it puts the government in charge of who gets health care and what kind of quality it will be. An example of this happened to a man in England, who had a broken ankle but was refused treatment because he was a smoker.

Whether you smoke or not, that scenario should terrify you. What's next, denying treatment to those who are obese? How about denying medical care to those who are elderly, since they won't be alive much longer anyway? These scenarios are very much like Nazi Germany in the 1930s, where disabled veterans, the crippled and the elderly were deemed less than desirable and were denied medical care and, in some cases, euthanized because they strained the limited resources of government medical care.

We can lower the cost of health care by passing House Resolution 3509, introduced by physician and Texas congressman Michael Burgess. It would cap non-economic malpractice damages that have driven up medical care costs over the past few decades. This bill is based on the highly-successful Proposition 12 amendment to the Texas constitution that voters passed a few years ago. While personal injury lawyers hate it, it has resulted in lower malpractice insurance premiums and more doctors returning to Texas to practice medicine.

Another way to lower health care costs is to get patients and health care providers more involved in understanding the real costs of medical care. In an example in Stossel's program, one small town doctor now refuses to accept health insurance. He provides a list of services and their corresponding prices and the patients pay him directly. As a small businessman, this is smart because he has reduced his overhead by eliminating the paperocracy of insurance forms and all the hassles that go with it.

This is where health savings accounts also help to lower costs because small items, like colds and sprained ankles would be paid for by the patient out of the savings account while major procedures like cancer treatment would covered by the patient's insurance plan.

To sum up, the way to lower health care costs is to reduce frivolous lawsuits, lower health care administrative costs and get patients and doctors more directly involved in the payment and cost of health care.

Learn more about this author, Tom Sutcliff.
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