Health care industry problems are endemic, both public and private, not just Obamacare.

I have yet to hear or read about problems with public health care that I have not experienced personally in the private sector for years and which continue through yesterday when my former company website was DOWN and one of its two designated private health insurance companies continued to be riddled with dead links.  I didn't check the other.

Neither my former company nor one of its health insurance companies could tell me specifically which Medicare plan was being offered.  Each said to contact the other ... repeatedly.  And neither website, when functioning at all, had that information nor other stuff that would be helpful.  The insurance company could not bring up the sign in page.

The problem extends to doctors, too.  I'm currently getting my medical services from a large corporation in Westchester county New York with many doctors spread out in its vast campuses, inconveniently strewn.  I've been trying for over a week to get someone there to tell me if my two choices from my former employer will be accepted in 2014.  This is unresolved.  The website has only vague old information.

My next task during the annual enrollment period is to create a spreadsheet to try to compare which doctors accept the two Medicare insurance options that I have.  That's another doctor trick: simply don't accept Medicare patients at all or limit the types.

When I hear about the current problems of Obamacare I wonder why the media focuses exclusively on problems in the public, government, systems and programs.  Where do media people and Republicans generally get their health insurance?  It must be on another planet.

What is it about health care that makes good policy and good systems so elusive?  The U.S. government screws up and Obama is a disaster as president but neither are at the root of the problems.  Maybe there's an elitism among the doctors that contributes.  Maybe it's our irrational concern about privacy, which I'm guessing causes many more deaths because we lack the basic mega data that could be studied for trends.

And will we ever eliminate insurance as the model?  We need health care, not health insurance.  Go to single payer, the government, like we do for interstate highways and national defense.

What a mess.  You can't blame it all on Obama.  The problems were there before his legislation was passed.