What's Wrong with U.S. Health Care

After reading David Sedaris’ charming mediation on Kookaburra birds in Australia and a childhood singing jag with his sister, Amy, when he was 10 and she 6 years old (did David carry a notebook with him during childhood?) in the August 24 issue of The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/24/090824fa_fact_sedaris
I read the blog “Live Chat” interview with Sedaris about his experiences in the French and U.S. Healthcare systems. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2009/08/questions-for-sedaris.html 
This is what Sedaris recalled.
THE NEW YORKER: Via e-mail, Pat Donohue, from Point Pleasant, New Jersey, asks: As a resident of France and an American citizen, your point of view on health care in the two nations is of interest to those of us who have never received medical treatment via a system such as France’s, which, I understand, is a hybrid between single-payer (the government of France) and some private insurers. We receive so much information to the negative on France’s health care, and I would like to hear your viewpoint and/or comparison between the two. Thanks.
DAVID SEDARIS: Allow me to answer with kidney stones. I had my first one at the age of thirty-four. At the time, I was living in New York and had no health insurance. Never in my life had I experienced such pain, but I couldn’t afford to go to the hospital, and so I passed it at home, not knowing until the end what it actually was. (I thought I was delivering Satan’s baby through my penis.)

I had my second kidney stone seven years later, in Paris. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and after looking at my options in the phone book in the phone book, I took the metro to a hospital in the 15th. Two minutes after walking through the door, I was in a private room. Delicious, mind-numbing drugs were delivered to my blood stream by way of a tube and life was beautiful. I was in the hospital for four hours, and as I was leaving, I asked the receptionist how I was supposed to pay.
“Oh,” she said, “We’ll send you a statement.”
“But you never even asked me my name.”
“Really?”
A few weeks later I got a bill for the equivalent of seventy dollars, this because I’m not a French citizen and am therefore not entitled to free care.

I got my third kidney stone a few months ago, while on a lecture tour of the United States. The hospital I went to was in Westchester County and the service was outstanding. Maybe I arrived at the slowest time, but, like in France, I was waited on immediately, and the doctor and nurses could not have been more pleasant. Again I was there for four hours, though this time the bill came to five thousand eight hundred dollars. Not including medicine.

I’m completely fascinated by the health-care debate going on in the United States, especially by posters of Obama with a little mustache drawn on his upper lip. Is that what Hitler is really known for, his health-care plan? To quote Bill Maher, “I haven’t seen this many pissed-off old white people since they cancelled ‘Murder She Wrote.’ ”

Now I live in England. I’ve just been granted Indefinite Leave To Remain, which allows me access to the National Health Service.

LAURIE ISRAEL:  So we are left with the question that is not being answered clearly in all the media accounts of our national Healthcare debate:  what is causing our health care to be so expensive and inaccessible, and what can we do about it.  We need clear, hard-nosed facts and statistics and numbers, not ”spin” and politics as usual.