The new Healthcare emphasis scares me a bit. It makes sense to spend money on prevention, except that it won't save a dime. To take a smoker who will die at an early age, of a disease that is uncurable and quick, and transform them into a healthy person, who lives for years, has numerous and expensive treatments over a long life, is a good thing, but it doesn't save money. Also, our best new diagnosis tools are the high tech scanners, and our best strategy is to permit lots of these to drive the price of a scan down. That won't happen.

The key to lowering health care cost is to persuade someone headed to the emergency room for a toothache or an upset stomach to go to a CVS clinic instead. The other key is for all Medicare and Medicaid service to be HMO programs, where unnecessary treatments are not reimbursed.
The final part of the cost is to have a very inexpensive catastrophic very high deductible insurance policy available for everyone.