National Health Care

I'm astonished by the controversy over some sort of national Health Care insurance. The arguments about cost, who pays, who is entitled, go on and on. But surely it must be obvious that there is something profoundly wrong about this argument?

We are ALREADY providing health care for the indigent, the poor, the uninsured and the uninsurable. People without insurance simply go to the nearest emergency room and obtain treatment. Of course they don't go for routine examinations or really minor illnesses, but those issues are barely covered by insurance for anyone, if they are covered at all.

So the poor get free medical care. Free, that is, in the sense that they themselves don't pay for it. The hospital provides medication and facilities, physicians provide services. The hospital simply divides the cost up and raises fees for those covered by insurance so that the loss is absorbed. We pay for the indigent through higher fees to the hospital and to the physicans and nurses. Did we think that all those things were just either falling out of the skies or were being paid for by the benevolence of the hospitals?

The fees charged by hospitals and physicians will be higher in areas where more such services are provided to the uninsured. Border states, such as Texas, California and Florida, will charge higher fees than, say, Nebraska hospitals. In other words, all a national health insurance program will do is to redistribute the costs nationwide so that all medical insurance costs are coverfed more equally. That's a good deal for us border-state dwellers, not so good for those living in North Dakota.

Am I missing something here? Or is this largely a political farce?