Health care provided by our government.

There is an agreed upon cost  approach  to give health care to 47 million new beneficiaries without massive new costs by being “more efficient” in allocating the currently available health care assets. Well, efficiency is good, right? Not necessarily.

Here is what this “efficiency” would mean in stark terms: severely restricting health care services to our elderly, and the severely and terminally ill. “Efficiency” here means providing services to millions of young and healthy, who do not need much of it, and cutting health care to seniors and the severely ill who “statistically do not have as much to lose by not getting good health care.”

In other words, the administration believes that those of above 60 will not live nearly as long, no matter what health care we receive, as a healthy 25-year-old, so why “waste” doctors, nurses, drugs, hospitals and surgeries on us? Health care resources, in cold, hard, inhumane computer calculations, are more “efficiently” used letting the elderly die years earlier after a less-healthy retirement.

Our problem, however, lies in the dwindling supply of health care providers. Most doctors are overworked, many are underpaid. The number of doctors is increasing at a woeful 1 percent a year, and the number of available nurses has been flat for years. With an increasing population -- and one that is aging as baby boomers move into their 60s -- who is going to provide health care to 45 million more Americans, even if we make the wildly optimistic assumption that we could afford to pay for it?

Many doctors from Canada made their way into the U.S. for the very same reason, efficiency in Canada’s government run health care. They were expected to do more and be paid less.

There are many, many small hospitals that are barely surviving today because of the limitations and payment schedule of medicare and Medicaid. You can rest assured under a new plan you will see small, rural, stand alone hospitals become a first stop care facility.

Another way to help pay for this new care is to tax the ones of you that are fortunate enough to have health care benefits at work. This may leave you paying so much tax you also will want to accept the government provisional insurance plan.

If you are 60 or older you may be in for a new experience in health care provisions. If you are under 65 you may also be in for a new experience in health care when you have to call a politician to get your surgery scheduled.

If you are simply a working taxpayer, you have no surprises coming, you can only expect less and pay more and more taxes.