Health Care in the United States: The Most Screwed Up System in the World

It appears that workers for the Tillamook Cheese Company have gone on strike over rising health care costs.

Production and other workers at Tillamook County Creamery Association went on strike Wednesday, marching picket signs around a coastal tourist stop and chafing against one of Oregon's cherished brands.

The issue: increasing health costs. Tillamook, a dairy cooperative formed in 1909, has proposed requiring employees to cover at least 5 percent of their health insurance premiums.

This should be simple, universal health care is in everyone's best interest. The cost of delivering in a single payer system would be greatly reduced, businesses wouldn't need to worry about covering their employees, and most importantly, we wouldn't have 45 million citizens with no health insurance.

This is a service that the rest of the world regards as a human right, and yet, in the United States we have developed a system that fails to cover everyone while actually increasing the price doing it. The United States government spends more on health care than Countries that actually do cover everybody, that's how bad the private secter has handled this responsibility. But we can't get universal coverage because of the argument that "the private secter is more efficient" that's just not true when talking about health care, the entire system is built on passing the buck to someone else. I hope Tillamook and its employees can reach a reasonable agreement to this problem, but what is really needed is an end to the way health care business is done in the United States. President Bush talks of blasting out of the water what is a vibrant healthy social program to fight poverty amongst the elderly and insists on the necessity of it's "reform" but ignores the real crisis that is health care.