I hope the AMA doesn't find a way to pull your license over this.

We need single payer, government-provided - yes socialized, if you will - universal healthcare. No one - absolutely no one should be in the business of providing healthcare services for a profit. No one. The privatized, for-profit practice, now extended to hospitals for Christ's sake, is obscene and shameful.

Fran Liebowitz was a well-known writer some years ago, and she made the simple point that hospitals and prisons simply should not be run for profit.

Anyway, we need to be reminded, and reminded, and reminded until we finally do what needs to be done--make medical care as public as our highway system. It's not as if the USA is incapable of operating huge clunking things as public assets is it?

And we have virtually the entire developed world to cherry-pick the best ideas from. Scratch that-- a lot of the developing world seems to have socialized medicine, too.

Surely at some point the widely shared pain and anger of a broken system has to be worse than the pain of change, right?

Train more doctors. Make it more competetive.

How can the US spend more of its GDP on healthcare than Australia, but cover fewer of it's citizens? I really really REALLY don't get it.

It would be nice to think that the government would DO something about it, but clearly the US government is just as broken as its healthcare system.

As a US citizen living in Australia, I'm constantly amazed at how absolutely sh*t our system is compared to the one here. And there is absolutely no need for it to be so crap.

People have this attitude that government-run medicare will mean poorer outcomes, which is based on insurance/pharmaceutical company fear-mongering. The truth is that Australia spends less per patient and has BETTER outcomes than the US.

Its simply mind boggling to think about.

But it all needs to move in the same sort of direction. There are other nations that do have private insurers--but they're all not-for-profit. In the end, the system needs to be one that focuses on transforming cash into healthy people.

Money spent on health care should go to health care, not to huge CEO salaries, huge administrative expenses, and eventually out as dividends to people who generally have more than sufficient money to begin with. Care should be provided to those that need it, not to those who can pay more. Insurance costs shouldn't be going to pay people who are specifically hired to deny claims and prevent care.

It's tragic that we've reached the point in the US that any of the previous paragraph needs to be said at all.

I'm hoping that I may live to see the day of a single-payer system that isn't tied into employment.

I'm always kind of amazed that the proponents of "small government" get riled up about the possibility of "socialized medicine" when our current system is too unwieldy to manage for much longer. Do they not appreciate how many "extra people"--coders, billing secretaries, social workers, a hospital has to employ just to wade through the different types of red tape used by different insurance companies? How is this somehow better?

We have a lot of problems with medical care, but if a surgeon is the on call doctor for a hospital he should show up and worry about getting paid later. If he isn't willing to take on that onus, then he should not be the only surgeon who is available. I hope that after this incident they found somebody more reliable. What if the child had died from shock or infection? The hospital would have been sued for providing inadequate care.

Yes, we need to insure people better. Much better. But universal health coverage will not be a huge boon to doctors financially. They will probably find that they have less paperwork, but less money also. .

I was an EMT in Houston for four years before I returned to Canada. I loved the US, and hated the health care system. Canadians spend half as much on health care and live longer. It is a crime for a doctor to charge a co-pay to a patient. Imagine that - a crime.

I needed an MRI recently, and the waiting time was four weeks. I can live with that. If it was an emergency, I would get it immediately.

I have a great drug plan, so I can't spend money when I go to a doctor or a hospital. I just need my Alberta Health card and my secondary insurance card, which covers everything not covered by the government insurance. I pay $120 a month for the secondary insurance.

When John McCain tells you that 'Canada has socialized medicine where a government bureaucrat gets between a patient and his doctor' he is lying. He knows better. We have single-payer health care - I go to any doctor I want in Canada, and all the bills go to the government. I pay for it through my taxes. Employers can't pay for your insurance and remain price competitive with Canada or Europe - look what is happening to General Motors.

The answer is simple, but would require the country to stand up to the AMA and the health insurance industry.

I don't know why you guys aren't rioting in the streets over your health care system.

I am a Canadian Orthopedic Resident. This account of what happened is truly appalling.

There are very few injuries that are considered orthopedic emergencies and an open fracture happens to be one of them. Whereas many orthopedic injuries can wait to be assessed by an Orthopod in the morning, an open fracture requires urgent management at the time of presentation.

In Canada, this Orthopod would probably be sued for negligence and would likely lose the case (in addition to being held accountable by the medical board).

I agree with a lot of sentiments expressed below. Medicine should not be a business.

"But universal health coverage will not be a huge boon to doctors financially. They will probably find that they have less paperwork, but less money also. ."

Why is this a problem? In most countries doctors are paid on par with other professionals with an equivalent level of education. In America doctors are generally vastly overpaid. They're more like businessmen than health care providers. I happen to know this because of where I work, and because members of my own family work in this field. The emphasis is always on maximizing profit, hitting the most number of patients per day, the amount of time spent on a visit, refusing to accept Medicare, etc.

With UHC urban doctors will probably make less money, rural doctors more. More doctors would be willing to practice in rural areas. Sounds like a great idea to me.