I can’t believe it is already June 18th. Essentially, by the time mid-August hits summer will be all but over. There is a huge part of me that is dreading the fall. The more mellow days of the summer are nice. We are vacationing in Arizona and just returned from Mexico with my side of the family. As I sit here with more time, I have been trying to catch up on all of the presidential campaigning. For many reasons that extend beyond gender, I am a huge supporter of Hillary Clinton. I really admire both Barack Obama and John Edwards; however, my gut tells me Hillary has the will necessary to change things that are really important to me, such as health care. When I was sixteen years old (about 1989), I wrote a research paper that compared Canadian health care to that of the U.S., in it, I advocated a move to a more universalized health care system such as that of Canada. At 34 years old, this remains an issue to me. Not because I have ever had to go without decent health care—I am one of the lucky USians that has had health-care coverage during my life—but because it is absurd to me that in a country as rich as the United States that we have 47 million uninsured people. And, many that are insured are underinsured. It does bother me that the democratic candidates are advocating “fixing” the existing system of health care. In my mind, we need to do away with it and move to something that cuts out the capitalist bent. I do believe that capitalism works in many contexts; however, I don’t think health care is one of them. I hope that Hillary will move toward a more sweeping revision of health care if she is elected. Alas, this is hope. Has anyone read the book Critical Condition by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalists Barlett and Steele? Just a brief description:

In their book, Barlett and Steele describe these problems in graphic detail. They explain how, instead of cross-subsidizing the poor with revenues from people who are more affluent, providers charge them higher prices for the same services as those received by the more fortunate. This price discrimination is supported by vigorous pursuit of people who fail to pay their health care debts. American private-sector bureaucrats, like their public-sector counterparts in Europe, increasingly have recourse to “cookbook medicine,” in which practice guidelines and protocols (all too often evidence-free) are imposed on practitioners. Given that medical practice exhibits established and significant variations and well-chronicled medical errors, together with a remarkable reluctance to measure success in improving the quality of life of patients, it is unsurprising that bureaucrats seek to establish quality standards in the health care industry. What is surprising is that their efforts in the United States and elsewhere remain feeble and are rarely “confused” by evidence of cost-effectiveness. But there again, this is no accident but, rather, the deliberate product of the incentive structures inherent in the U.S. health care system. These incentives protect the insurers and providers from contestability, muting price competition and ensuring that competition in quality is superficial and rarely informed by patient-outcome data.