No easy answers

CJR's Trudy Lieberman finds a great article on health care in the Catholic Courier.

There's an awful lot of ink about whose plan covers more people, but the Courier gets what (in my opinion) is the real meat of the matter:

"Attempts to address the issue of the uninsured cannot succeed unless and until we examine the causes for the high costs of health services," said Ron Guglielmo, director for health care for the New York State Catholic Conference, during testimony to the state panel.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, U.S. health-care spending grew 6.7 percent in 2006 to about $7,026 per resident, accounting for 16 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Per-capita health-care spending has more than doubled since 1990. And, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, health-care spending is projected to rise to more than $12,750 per person by 2016.

If you cover more people and costs keep going up - you don't have a solution:  you have a recipe for breaking the bank.  

We need to get more dollars covering more people with preventative care. Otherwise we're just feeding the maw of the system that got us here.