Have you ever had sticker shock? I mean a jolt so powerful that it knocks you flat? You hold up the price tag and then someone has to hold you up. Mouths drop, purses drop and then we all drop. On the way to the floor you ask yourself, who in their right mind would imagine paying that much for just a Band-Aid? Welcome to the projected cost of health-care reform.

Health care is expensive because we make it expensive. We, in this case, is the collective we. We the patients, we the doctors, we the hospitals, we the pharmaceutical industry, we the smokers, we the government of the people for the people, we the aging, we the drug users, we the technophiles, we the agro-food industrial complex, we the unions, we who hold public office, we the polluters, we the crooks, we the TV watchers and producers, we the insurance companies, we the plaintiff attorneys. Have I left anyone out?

The headlines say that the cost of insuring the nation's uninsured will be between $800 billion and $900 billion dollars. Even in this age of a few billion here and a few billion there, it adds up to real money. One might justify paying that amount if there were a guarantee we mortals would have something to show for it like more mortality. But eternal life is not for sale in our current system.

P.S. This trillion is to be added to the $2 trillion we already spend.

To buy more of the same is not only stupid, it is shameful. The same today is medical errors, administrative costs that exceed every other country's, inflated drug prices. It is paying for a medical industrial complex the Pentagon and its expensive toilets envy.

With a current $2.9 trillion annual bill for health care we sit on a lot of expensive bed pans.

If everyone agrees that we already spend too much for waste, fraud, inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, duplications, and mistakes, then why are we asked to pay more for the same wrongs? We spend too much on the wrong therapies, priorities, operations and medicines. We pay for the unscientific fueled by greed. In other countries there is rationing by decision; in the United States we ration by confusion, but we still ration. Do not be deceived. When the system forces people to go into medical bankruptcy, we ration by sucking people dry.

One way to decrease the cost is to decrease the payment for the services. This sounds easy enough; the payers on Jan. 1 mail out checks for 50 cents on the dollar of charges. Unfortunately it will simply continue inequities on the cheap without fixing anything. Care will be denied and hospitals will close. Innovations would slow or cease and no one would be better off.