[tptacek]

We also need to increase the pool of doctors.

We probably don't so much need to deal with malpractice insurance, since that fix doesn't (to employ a congenial metaphor) change the exponent in the Big-O cost of health care.

We need to make it simpler to get drugs on the market, but we also need to walk the tightrope of doing that while regulating pharma marketing, particularly to medical practices.

We need to restructure care in the US. We recognize that the E.R. is a terrible provider-of-first-resort and that non-emergency E.R. visits are damaging the system. We need to start realizing that M.D. doctors are also poor providers of first resort, and get a nationwide system of low-cost clinics deployed. That's already starting to happen at places like Walgreens.

We very much need to figure out how to start exploiting the Internet to provide some level of routine care for patients.

These are all things that do need to happen. But they don't have much to do with the problem that insurance problems are randomly bankrupting large numbers of Americans. We need to fix that problem first. Face it: the most expensive cohort of patients in the US, accounting for by far the majority of our exposure to rising medical costs, have had socialized single-payer health care for decades. Access to private insurance and the "cost curve" of health care are simply orthogonal problems.

[ScottBurson]

I think we really would do best to attack the cost explosion problem at the same time we attack the coverage problem. Fixing the coverage problem is mostly a matter of political will (granted that the opposition has been bitter). Getting costs under control requires far-reaching changes to the health care system itself and will take years at best.