THE AMERICAN HEALTHCARE CONUNDRUM

Healthcare in the United States isn't really as advertised. In that, I mean it's not really health care. We are a country consumed by quick fixes and low costs. Also, we don't seem to want to be told how to live our lives. One need look no further than the expanding waistlines of roughly one-third of this country to realize that we don't want to exercise, nor do we want to scale back our massive meal portions.

What's worse is that while most of the country is united in feeling that healthcare costs are out of control, and that greater than 60% of personal bankruptcies are directly caused by medical bills, we're quite divided on how to solve the problem.

For awhile, I have listening to the debate over the public option versus private health insurance. Insofar that I have been covered by almost every major American health insurance company (and been "forced out" of some of them), I feel a vested interest in the discussion.

As the U.S. Congress tackles the intricacies of the healthcare abyss, I intend on investigating just how challenging it would be to put together my own "group" to be insured by one of the major insurance carriers, and how costly it might be. If companies can purchase plans based upon their size, then wouldn't it follow that a group of companies, pooling their workforces, would be able to buy a better plan for less money? And if that is the case, would smaller groups be willing to jump into the pool with each other, or rather, would the leadership of each company be amenable?

I'm not exactly sure where to start this investigation, but I figure that laying out my various questions is a good place to start. Perhaps I'll ask the broker through which my company purchases health insurance.