Campaigning in South Carolina late last month, former president Bill Clinton labeled healthcare the pre-eminent domestic issue facing the country, not to mention its next president.

Few would disagree.

And that's especially true for the scores of DOTmed Business News readers who've already proffered some robust opinions in DMBN's national survey about what's broken in the US's healthcare system and how to begin fixing it.
Certainly, what the presidential candidates are saying on the campaign trail has brought the issue into sharp focus for the population at large. But for millions and millions of Americans already under a Doctor's care or regularly taking prescribed medicines, however, they are painfully familiar with the Pandora's box known as US healthcare. Under optimum conditions it means reams of paperwork, pre-approvals, faxes, emails, long tortured telephone calls to insurers and health providers and frustration of gargantuan proportions. And for millions of other citizens and illegal immigrants it means no adequate care of any kind, save for trips to hospital emergency rooms with the system picking up the tab, provided the indigent are even allowed through the door.

Though DMBN's national survey is a work in progress, preliminary feedback is fairly consistent in pointing the finger of blame at the government and politicians, healthcare insurers, the major pharmaceutical companies and, of course, lawyers. Also coming in for its fair share of slings and arrows, the Food and Drug Administration, illegal immigrants, and the media.

One respondent to the survey, Bob Pray, was succinct about the FDA. "The biggest problem with health care in the US is the FDA. They approve dangerous drugs that kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. They need to be held more accountable for drugs that kill when used as prescribed."

Many others, however, while routinely lambasting the FDA for what they see is the agency's duplicitous role in healthcare, instead focused on the agency's recalcitrance in approving new therapies and technology that its proponents say could make a real difference now.

Says Elfi Liliana Hacker, owner of a medical instrument company in South Carolina; "big business--insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and incompetent government agencies--should never be making windfall profits when the basic health care of our people is not addressed. I hope our voters make a move to put a candidate in office who will stop devoting our resources to creating and implementing deadly force and weapons, and place their focus on improving and securing the quality of our lives. Whoever is in office needs to stop talking and start doing."

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