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Universal Health Care is a badly mis-understood term. Some refer to the health care generally found in the European areas, most notably in Scandinavian countries. Some refer to the Canadian system. Yet others trash this form of health insurance as doing away with competition, downgrading quality of care, and other derogatory terms.

In fact, Universal Health Care is a good solid system of dealing with our nations out of control health care systems. Our drug prices are 75-80% higher than they need to be. The average price of a visit to a doctor for any reason is north of $100. A specialist visit can run into $500 or $1,000, depending upon the location and specialty. Health care costs vary from location to location as if a health problem in Florida was not as worthy as one in Alaska. A short ride in an ambulance starts at about $500. A short ride in a helicopter to access health care in a specialty hospital can run $5,000 or more.

In short, we are pricing ourselves right out of our health care system because we refuse to go to a system that regulates the many facets of health care. There is nothing wrong with adopting a rule that all General Practitioners get $XXX for a visit to diagnose a routine illness and write a prescription. The process of finding an average price is not that difficult! We should rein in the 7-12% annual inflation in health car we are suffering through at the present.

Many have said a procedure like that would drive out the better physicians and encourage the weaker ones! I don't think so! The physicians I have spoke to are not overly concerned with what their office charges for a treatment. The physicians seem to be more concerned about treating the problem and then worrying about the payment. Additionally, most physicians are members of health care groups and billing is done far away from treatment - in other words most doctors don't know what is being charged for an appointment. In deed, there are manuals with charging codes that apply to everything you could incur as an illness and the doctors simply don't know what those codes and charges amount to.

Most physicians seem to agree, we are not covering enough people with adequate health care. Those that cannot afford health care at a physicians office, go to the emergency room of the hospital. This has resulted in many hospitals doing away with traditional Emergency Room services simply because it doesn't pay - not by millions and millions of dollars. The un-insured in this country amount

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