On a world stage, the United States is well behind the times in terms of offering socialized medicine. As it stands today, even with the recently passed healthcare legislation, America is the only civilized country not offering some type of single-payer or taxpayer-funded, government-sponsored system.

And while this leaves the country standing out as cruel and unusual to many across the globe and even within America, the statistics seem fairly clear. The U.S. healthcare system has the best doctors in the world, the best ER care, the best procedures, and hundreds of thousands of people from countries practicing socialized medicine make the trek to the States every year to either work in the medical industry or to receive a procedure they could not receive at home.

No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum, the statistics are overwhelming. The nation’s healthcare industry is in crisis due to the outrageous rates people have to pay for private insurance, but the level of care has never been called into question.

For a sampling of what many people, including doctors, are so afraid of, just look at the numbers of private insurance compared to public insurance. For a private policy, wherein the insured gets to choose his or her own doctors and own procedures, the cost is roughly $2,500/year. Now, for a government-sponsored plan, wherein a board of politicians chooses the doctors and procedures, the cost per plan is $7,000/year.

According to some doctors, changing America’s healthcare system overnight without first cleaning up the fraud and waste will lead to poorer care, fewer doctors, and trillions more added onto the already enormous 14-trillion-dollar debt in the country.

New Jersey Doctors Fight Back

A lawsuit filed last year by New Jersey Physicians Inc., challenging the constitutionality of “Obamacare,” was finally heard last Wednesday in a federal appeals court. The crux of the matter was simple: doctors and patients believed that it was unconstitutional to force people to buy insurance.

The suit is still pending, and along with the New Jersey suit, a dozen other states have filed lawsuits against the federal government opposing this healthcare legislation.

Whether for or against government-run healthcare, the fears of many people involved in the industry are legitimate. Supposedly, the new health legislation is supposed to lower prices across the board. However, people are to be forced to buy policies to fund the government-sponsored side of the equation, and the new forced policies imposed on business owners are causing rates to skyrocket.

The NJ doctors are arguing not only against the constitutionality of the bill, but also that the bill will ultimately:

• Cause a flood of patients in American hospitals
• Create long waiting lists for procedures
• Create government panels whose job is to “okay” procedures and policies
• Cause doctors to entertain other careers
• Cause government-sponsored healthcare to explode past the already inflated $7k per policy
• Add billions of dollars to the deficit every year and trillions to the debt
• And damage the overall system by promoting quantity over quality

Only time will tell how the legislation holds up in the court of law, but one thing’s for sure: At this current point in time, the new healthcare legislation has caused insurance prices to skyrocket across the board, having the exact opposite effect of what was promised to Americans only one short year ago.