There were some letters in today's Globe about the Universal Health Insurance debacle, and this one, from Lawrence Coletta of Mendon made the point I was trying to in another post:

...[In] "A Second Opinion" by Dr. Arnold Relman, a professor at Harvard Medical School, Relman suggests that the best fix to the current healthcare crisis is to remove the middleman, the insurance companies, who take 15 to 25 percent of every healthcare dollar spent for profit and overhead. This idea, of course, scares the industry to death and prompts its friends in Washington to come up with tax schemes and other smoke screens to delay the inevitable. Bush's plan to shift some of the burden around, but allow the industry to take billions out of the pockets of ailing Americans, will do nothing for us and keep caviar on their plates. 

I am not sure I'm ready to argue for a single-payer solution, like the writer of the letter above does.  That would truly be "socialized medicine," and having seen what that's like during my years in the Eastern Block, I'm just not sure that's an answer.  What is happening in Central Europe is private hospitals are opening up to take care of the wealthy, while what is universally available is substandard (and sometimes downright medieval) care.

When folks suggest that the current legislation in Massachusetts is "socialized medicine" they are talking out their asses (and yes, I'm talking to you, Hub Politics).  The Massachusetts plan is the opposite.  It places the whole burden on the individual and does very little, if anything, to rein in the insurance companies.  In fact it hands them a half a million new customers who can't say no.

So long as the healthcare and insurance providers are colluding on prices that are too high for middle class folks and policies that are expensive and inadequate, things will only get worse. 

Is there a third-way that's both practicable and humane between what we've got and a single-payer system? 

I have to wonder, are we asking the right questions about healthcare?