As a doctor, I have watched with great interest as the recent "reduced" cost capitulations from the nation's so-called health-care industry have come pouring in to the president -- just prior to the current administration collecting a nearly unbeatable congressional poker hand to change our national health- care system for the better.

If you believe that Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Big Hospital Companies and Big Medicine are offering this corporate largesse to benefit you, the citizen-patient, I have some fishing rights in the Great Salt Lake to sell you.

And money itself, no matter how much is provided, will never fix our current broken health-care system. The very term "system" here implies something more than can be simply fixed by throwing cash at it to reduce payers' expenses. The basic trouble is the increasingly hurting everyman caught in the morass of today's health-care crisis when it is tantalizingly close to fixable.

The time, expense and frustration incurred in fighting the insurance companies' zone defense against payments is, by itself, a gigantic waste. What is totally missing here is an unfettered patient and doctor decision-making process now obscured by this thing we called insurance. Let me say unequivocally: We do not need insurance . What we need is automatic health care , provided whenever we require it.

Do we negotiate and correspond with 9-1-1? Are we sometimes denied access to it? No. Sure, we pay for it, which we, the public, agreed to, but it is now available automatically.

Purchasing health-care insurance just implies the illusion of actual delivered health care -- for an exorbitant price, much of which goes to pay the stockholders and upper management in this industry gone wild on profits accrued from human suffering. If you think that AIG was corrupt, just take a closer look at these guys. They lobby ad nauseam in state legislatures and D.C., at no small expense which they ultimately pass on to the patient -- you.

Notice all their TV, radio and billboard advertising -- and this is also done by the hospital systems claiming a nonprofit status. And these guys are really going to help us?

Let's hope that President Obama and Congress can actually help us get back to the concept of patient-plus-doctor medical care, without the money-grubbing "help" supposedly offered outside of this essential and unbeatable historic alliance.

Jeff Clawson is a Salt Lake City physician.