US Supreme Court Upholds Affordable Health Care Act

[smegged]

... which to me suggested that the actual system itself was broken and that the problem was not the amount of dollars thrown into the system.

Yes. The system is broken (our care is too expensive), and so I don't understand how the solution is to make us buy into it. More demand and less competition will lower the price?

The answer is reform. I don't know what reform would work, but obviously the healthcare framework is at least in part to blame. In part it could also be due to societal issues (higher instances of gun crime than in the rest of the western world putting pressure on the demand for surgeons, Hollywood placing upward pressure on the demand for plastic surgeons, poor nutrition placing upward pressure on diabetes and obesity-related illness services etc...).

In Australia we have two systems - a public and a private system. Legally, if you earn over $80 000 p.a. you need to either have private health cover or pay a significant levy at tax time. The public system is much larger than our private one, but the private system is the one to go to if you want to avoid elective surgery waiting lists. I'm not saying that our system is perfect (it's not) but it seems to be more economically efficient than the US system.