In the end, the costs will pass to the American public in one way or another. For now, a general uneasiness in the health care sector as many prepare for the worst has led to preemptive cutbacks to staff and equipment purchasing. This in turn, has led to even more nervous cocooning as vendors already on weak footing due to the tightening of lending and the dry up of available capital begin to be consolidated, liquidated or bankrupted.

Couple this with more cuts to reimbursement coming up and the problems the health care segment face become even more daunting. The planned cutbacks don't take into account the suspicious positioning of the revamped guidelines for breast cancer screening by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Are the recommendations just positioning to enable further reimbursement cuts?


At the end of the day, while it's a noble goal to provide health care for so many uninsured, if the health care industry is gutted to do so, and the average person can't get straight answers from the people they elected to lead, we all lose.

We'll of course be covering developments from this bill and more in this column, in the magazine and in our online news so stay tuned.

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