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Health Care Reform: Sick and Wrong

America’s disastrous health care system is responsible for incalculable amounts of illness, death, lost productivity and federal deficit — not to mention anxiety, anger and disgrace. And it’s not going to get fixed, writes Matt Taibbi in the new issue of Rolling Stone, because it’s encased in another failed system: the U.S. government. Rather than attempt to remedy the problem this summer, our government sat down and demonstrated its dizzying ineptitude. “We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good,” writes Taibbi. “It was that bad.”

Taibbi breaks down the five steps Congress took to be sure no bill would pass — aiming low, gutting the public option, packing it with loopholes, providing no leadership and blowing the math — in his story, which is available on stands now. In a series of video interviews for RollingStone.com, Taibbi explores one of our system’s most severe flaws, explains how the government wedged itself into an awkwardly damning position, and looks at how the proposed bill would change the ordinary American’s life.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the American health care system is that 31 percent of costs are associated with administration and paperwork. Here Taibbi examines the easiest way to eliminate the red tape:

Taibbi on how the Democrats wound up on the defensive — and theories that the government struck a sideline deal with the pharmaceutical industry:

Inside the “individual mandate” that would require people to buy insurance and how the bill might make conditions worse than before: