Washington Post columnist correctly notes that OECD nations provide equal or better health care but at a fraction of the cost paid by the US. But he then ignores the obvious conclusion — that we should adopt one of their proven systems — and instead claims that an unproven and unlikely scheme using vouchers to private insurers would work.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has released a new report that indicates Gov. Deval Patrick’s goal of controlling health care cost by moving the state towards a global payment method is unlikely to product real savings

Another problem for Romney-care. Even with an individual mandate private insurers in Massachusetts costs to consumers rise faster than public plans. How much more evidence do we need that single payer health care is the only affordable way to go?

Massachusetts is still struggling with controlling health care costs since it decided to embrace health care reform by just expanding our broken private insurance system to cover more people. A problem in Massachusetts, which is common around the country, is that there are huge variances in what is paid for the same procedure.

As you can see in this helpful chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation, America pays much more for health care than any other first-world country.

There are a lot of false ideas or very minor explanations that are overstated to try to justify why we pay so much.

The main cause of our long-term deficit is our absurdly inefficient health care system that costs nearly twice as much as anywhere else in the world. If politicians honestly looked for a simple solution to this problem, within five minutes they would find out almost every other industrialized nation on Earth has it.

Any deficit reduction plan that is not focused mostly on reforming health care is simply not serious about fixing the true roots of our long-term deficit.

The health insurance industry makes a substantial part of its profits by hanging on to premium dollars as long as possible — premiums which are established after assessing anticipated risk and expected claims. But if all claims are paid, there’s no need for managing risk by reserving premium dollars, and no need to hold reserves for investment. Getting insurers and Wall Street to give up the reserves is going to be a challenge.

The White House and Democratic leaders have made many promises about health care reform throughout this long and winding process—from guaranteeing affordable, quality care for everyone to pledging tougher regulation of the medical industrial complex that created this broken system in the first place. If the majority party wants to honestly deliver on these promises—not to mention if they want to remain in the majority—then a concerted and immediate effort is required to prove that this week’s legislation is truly the first step toward reform, and not the last.

The greatest problem with the Senate health care bill is not that it does “too little” to help people. The problem is that the bill does too many terrible things to help all the bad actors.