Well, It's Certainly Broken, Why Can't We Fix It?

Reuters is reporting that the current health care system in this country wastes up to $850 million yearly.

The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.

The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.

"America's healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars, and the opportunities to slow the fiscal bleeding are substantial," the report reads.

"The bad news is that an estimated $700 billion is wasted annually. That's one-third of the nation's healthcare bill," Kelley said in a statement.

"The good news is that by attacking waste we can reduce healthcare costs without adversely affecting the quality of care or access to care."

You'd think with all these self-proclaimed conservatives in the country (It's 40% now in the Gallup poll and has been between 36 and 40% now since 1992) that they would be interested in cutting that level of waste and bloat in the system. Alas, they're more interested in protecting insurance industry profits.

You know, Obamacare would more than pay for itself if we just cut say, 20% of this waste out of the system. I don't see why we can't do it. We're losing a full third of our country's entire health care expenditure yearly to stuff we don't get anything for. Why not convert that into a health care system that works?