A real Obamacare story.

[woodswise]

Thats pure garbage. Where do you get your info, the pravda or huffington post?? People didn't have insurance back then, family\local doctors worked for trade , cash when they could and a lot for free. Medical science was no where near it is now. rich folk died of the same ''maladies

You really do live in a dream world don't you?

The only way to go back to the old way of doing things (as you suggest will fix the healthcare crisis) is to stop mandating emergency room care for those who cannot afford it and to make medicine available to those who can afford it.

If we make that change as you suggest, Do you really think a poor person with a broken bone will get it set if no one will pay? Do you really think a poor person with diabetes will get insulin and the other care they need to prevent the disease progressing rapidly to lost limbs, and then death? Do you really think the poor will get their immunizations if they cannot afford to pay?

Here is an excerpt from a wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine:

Criticism of modern medicine

According to Paul Farmer, the main problem for modern medicine is lack of access in poor regions. There is an "outcome gap" between the rich and poor that is most noticeable with expensive-to-treat diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis. The majority of medical resources and therapies are concentrated in the rich, low-incidence regions such as the West. On the other hand, countries in the developing world have high rates of HIV but lack the necessary resources to treat them.[14]

Medical errors and overmedication and other forms of iatrogenesis (harms caused by medical treatment) are also the focus of complaints and negative coverage. Practitioners of human factors engineering believe that there is much that medicine may usefully gain by emulating concepts in aviation safety, where it is recognized that it is dangerous to place too much responsibility on one "superhuman" individual and expect him or her not to make errors. Reporting systems and checking mechanisms are becoming more common in identifying sources of error and improving practice. Clinical versus statistical, algorithmic diagnostic methods were famously examined in psychiatric practice in a 1954 book by Paul E. Meehl, which found statistical methods superior.[15] A 2000 meta-analysis comparing these methods in both psychology and medicine found that statistical or "mechanical" diagnostic methods were, in general, although not always, superior.[15]

Disparities in quality of care given among local demographics are often an additional cause of controversy.[16] For example, elderly mentally ill patients received poorer care during hospitalization in a 2008 study.[17] Rural poor African-American men were used in an infamous study of syphilis that denied them basic medical care.