Presidential Debate and Health Care

As I wrote in the last post, it's pretty telling that my (unscientific) poll showed that most people are pretty pessimistic about any improvements to the health care system in the US (at least in the near future). This is pretty notable considering the hieghtened attention given to this topic during the recent presidential debates.
Although the economy seems to be trucking along at a decent pace, there do seem to be some pretty ominous clouds on the horizon if one takes into account how broken the health care system is, the mounting national debt (more than 50% GDP) and miscellaneous obligations (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.). I'm no economist, but if this were a household, I don't think it'd be considered too stable.
If the country were a household and the primary bread winner lost her/his job, it'd be in a heap of trouble. A comparable situation would be if China and Japan decided to stop financing our debt by not purchasing anymore T-bills.
This all reminds me of the Jack Nicholson movie with the memorable line, "What if this is as good as it gets?" I mean, we all assume that, eventually, the health care system is going to get better. It's a key issue in the presidential election. Things have to get better, right?
But, what if this is really "as good as it gets?" How pessimistic should we be? Or is there really reason to be optimistic and believe that access to, quality and cost of health care are really going to move in the direction that we desire?

Unscientific Web Poll on Uninsured

First of all apologies for the lack of posts these past few months, but I've been considering expanding this concept of looking for new ideas on health and health care to a more advanced platform.

I started this blog to share what I've been reading or learning about health, but my main objective is to learn more from others. In order to accomplish this, I'm going to start posting more often and, hopefully, I'll get some more interesting feedback.

Nevertheless, I'm thinking of expanding beyond a blog and creating a site for people with the same needs as myself. Specifically, though I know there are a lot of websites devoted to Health care, I'm actually looking for something with more of a point of view (e.g., not so pro-Pharma and a bit more open minded). Any ideas would certainly be welcome on this.

On another front, I conducted a small, unscientific web poll soliciting a prediction on the number of uninsured Americans in the future and came up with the chart at the top of this post. For the most part, people would seem to be pessimistic (I'd count myself among them) about the future of the uninsured in America.

Even more interesting, the female respondents (70 out of the 200) were more realistic/pessimistic since 77% of these (compared to 71% of males) feel that the number of uninsured will increase. Even more interesting is the fact that 100% respondents in the 35-49 age group concur with the mayority of respondents (that the number of insured will increase).

Looking forward to your comments. :)