Can we go forward from where we are and pick apart the current plan, and get rid of the bad while bringing in the good (with it still making financial sense)?
Is there some particular reason that the existing legislation should serve as a starting point? In addition to all the practical flaws with the law and the underlying approach, it isn't even supported by the present Congress or the public. Is that a good place to begin?
From a Medicare type system that takes out 3% for all administrative costs . . .
This is extremely misleading, and typical of the kind of argumentation you have said you oppose.
In a nutshell: That very low Medicare admin cost number only counts the cost of the bureaucrats who send out the checks, it does not count the many other admin costs that are typically bundled into the %ages when looking at insurance companies. A fairly good apples-to-apples comparison would be the administrative costs of "regular" Medicare plans and Medicare Advantage plans. If you'd like more info on this issue, please take a look at
this post by Martha and the several posts that follow.
The one most effective means of truly controlling costs is utilizing very large buying pools and the bigger the better.
I don't know why you would say this. A bigger buying pool, in itself, does nothing to lower costs. Example: The US government buys more airplane tickets than any private company, and pays more per ticket and per mile than just about anybody. The US government buys more commercial vehicles than any private business, and they do not get a good price.
What drives down prices is
competition. That's the only proven way to do it--any other means (e.g. government caps on what can be charged for services) only serves to make a given good or service scarce. We don't want medical care to be scarce: that's inconvenient at best, deadly at worst.
Competition works in every other area of our lives to improve the quality and value of services. It's a tremendous power for good. Health care
is different from many other services in important ways, but it is not so unique that we need to throw away competition.
I so wish this health care issue could be brought out of the political arena and viewed in a united manner.
Your post and the thousands of others on this subject by all of us clearly indicate that there's disagreement on some very important fundamentals. If the government is going to be involved with solving the problem, then of course it will be a political issue. How else
could it be solved? That's the means by which we address big problems in this country. Often, when folks say "I wish we could just leave politics out of it", what they really mean is "I wish people would just do things my way".