According to a Harris Poll of all industrial nations, Americans are the least satisfied with their health care.

An economic overview of America's system is: 42 million people are not covered, the various health care plans place rigid limitations on which doctors and hospitals people can use, cost-saving measures are forcing patients out of hospital beds prematurely, administrative costs are approaching 25% of the health care dollar, managed care is generally structured such that physicians have incentives to cut costs and gain revenue by withholding care, and many Americans live in fear of losing whatever care they have.

Our current system is based on the power of the insurance industry to stifle any challenges from alternatives. They advocate a competitive environment where they set the rules. These rules give us health care at a very high cost with unusually high profits going to the health care industry and massive salaries going to the associated executives.

In contrast, the single payer system that Canada has used for the last 25 years has drastically simplified their administration costs. For instance, it takes more people to administer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts that it does to administer the entire health care system of Canada. Before Canada implemented their national health program, their health costs were the same portion of their economy as in the U.S. After they implemented their program, their costs stabilized at 9% while U.S. costs have increased to 14%. They spend one tenth of what U.S. health care providers spend on overhead.

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FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) reported after studying the 1994 California ballot issue that there were no articles in the media during the entire pre-election period that pointed out that other countries have single payer systems or what their experience has been. Americans might be interested to know that Canadians live longer, have lower maternal mortality rates, and lower infant mortality. Before single payer was implemented in Canada, infant mortality was similar to that in the U.S.; today there are 9.1 deaths in the first year of life per 1000 births in the U.S. and 6.8 in Canada. In addition, they have more hospital admissions, more hospital days, more physician visits, more immunizations, and more surgical procedures per person than we have in the U.S.

Obama's policies have turned us into a nation debating whether we should be as liberal as Nixon or as conservative as Armey or Bachmann.