Even sharing a room with another patient is a luxury in most developed countries where wards of 15 patients or more are the norm. Certainly having one's room in a hospital and nurses at the beck and call of a button is a luxury that patients in the U.S. take for granted. I don't. I am amazed what great care most people receive even in the absence of insurance. Are there problems? Of course, nothing is perfect, but it is the best in the world right now and in it is on demand. One need not wait months to be treated or seen by a doctor.

Socialized medicine in many countries means that patient's families must bring them fresh linens and food every day. When drugs are short, doctors write prescriptions and families have to go outside of the hospital to purchase them, often on the black market since pharmacies can be very short stocked. When their budgets run out, they stop buyin basic drugs such as antibiotics and pain killers. Some surgeries and invasive diagnostic procedures such as colonoscopies are often performed without anesthetics.

Nurses do not fawn over patients since one nurse has to care for over 50 patients. In order to get care or even routine attention, the patient's family must bribe the attending physician, the attending nurse, the janitor, and whoever else should care for the patient as part of their paid duty. Nobody comes in every 15 minutes to check on the patient, their vitals, they are abandoned for days, even after surgery. It is not uncommon for a patient without family to be found paralized or dead following routine surgery because there was no adequate follow-up care and nobody to fetch immediate help.

Is this the kind of medical care Americans want? Why? You have Mercedes health care and you want to trade it in for a Cuban style clunker?

All the Republican House members who are doctors (MD) should wear lab coats - 10% of Republican House members are MD's, 18 of them. Sentate too, at least 2 are MD's. That would counter the TV photo-ops of Obama, who pretends that most MD's approve of his crazy takeover of US medicine.

Excellent column once again, Dr. Sowell. You have identified the cause and effect of medical care in the U.S. But the present "joust" has absolutely nothing to do with medical care. It does have to do with redistribution of income, dominance, control and tyranny. Healthcare is an excuse to obtain all of those other things in an expeditious manner without raising concern. Then it's too late! The elections, scheduled for Nov2010 can be cancelled because all of those antiquated documents have been shredded or are no longer applicable. The liar-in-chief can stop campaigning now because he's just made himself King of the Western Hemisphere and Martial law is in charge. We have effectively been neutralized - without firing a shot.

When is the republican leadership (still an oxymoron) going to say at every opportunity, "government control or even a say in health care is unconstitutional." Don't hang by your thumbs waiting for it to happen.

"If medical insurance simply covered risks-- which is what insurance is all about-- that would be far less expensive than covering completely predictable things like annual checkups. Far more people could afford medical insurance, thereby reducing the ranks of the uninsured."

This is the concept we should be pounding home to the American people, and quite frankly I believe a lot of Americans already get it.

Look, the GOP didn't block Obamacare 5 times already. They didn't have the numbers to do it. Even if every single Republican voted against it (and they did for the most part), the bills still would not have passed. The GOP could no more have blocked those bills than they could have prevented the Chilean earthquake.

It was the Democrats who defeated the bills, in response to massive pressure from regular Americans. Ordinary American voters defeated Obamacare, over and over again by faxing, calling and writing to their Congressmen to express their strong opposition to the bills.

Yet not only does Obamacare not do anything to lower costs, it adds tremendously to the problem. What's the Liberals' answer to a problem caused by overregulation? Massive expansion of regulation.

Insurance is about managing risk. It's not about getting free stuff. The notion that you can go to the hospital for an in-grown toenail and get 100% free care (perhaps with a small deductible depending which health insurance you have) is preposterous. But it's done every day here. That's the kind of very minor thing we should be able to pay out of pocket. That would give us truly less expensive health insurance without sacrificing service.