Health-care fix starts with cost controls

Everyone in the presidential derby talks about what they will do about the terrible expense of health care. The Congress has allowed the national debt to grow from $1 trillion to $9 trillion.

Is has no business loading the cost of universal health care for the country on top of this horrible debt load.

The idea of promising to provide everyone with health care is just the kind of irresponsible, pie in the sky that has gotten us into the fiscal mess we're in.

The first thing Congress must do is find ways to decease the cost of health care overall.

After shaking out the high costs, then the people can consider the actual cost per taxpayer and whether we really can afford it.

We will spend 20 percent -- $2.6 trillion -- of our $13 trillion gross domestic product in 2008 on health care. That's $1 of every $5 we spend for goods and services in 2008.

If candidates had the ability to get the Congress into a good fiscal analysis of the health care program, this would be a dramatic answer to one of the toughest problems facing the country.

There is a strong lobbying factor involved here that is costing taxpayers a lot of money.

The industry consistently gets its price for treatments and there is no shopping or negotiating.

Medicare isn't allowed to negotiate any drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry.

It's better to attack this problem before it blows up in our face.

This would make a great place for leadership to step up and mount a program in dire need of change.

Presidential hopefuls would be a good place to start. They are talking to voters all day long.

We must break down the cost of the whole program and acknowledge to the country that this can and must be done.

But Congress must buy into this and show the intestinal fortitude and leadership to take back control from the lobbyists.

Congress can't continue to use the Bush administration as a scapegoat for why it has a 20 percent favorable rating with voters.

Turning this health care mess on its head and cleaning it out would be a feather in the cap of whoever got it turned around.

This situation is a U.S. thing, not a Democrat/GOP thing.

It demands non-partisan work because it touches all of us.

Chuck Barr

St. Charles