Based on how the government currently runs medicaid/medicare, does one think their efficiency will suddenly skyrocket for no reason?
In general, it seems to me that those who support universal health care (socialized medicine) are either unemployed/uninsured or are currently on some sort of government support.
When people become apathetic and let others do their thinking for them, what will become of our nation? History reveals that answer.
Original column by Mark Steyn here, bits below.
Big government depends, in large part, in going around the country stirring up apathy – creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.
Take health care. Have you read any of these health care plans? Of course not. They’re huge and turgid and unreadable. None of the senators whose names are on the bills have read ‘em; why should you?
When President Barack Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it.
“Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.
If you attempt to devise a health care “plan” for 300 million people, it’s bound to get a bit complicated. But a health care plan for you, Joe Schmoe of 27 Elm Street, didn’t used to be that complicated, did it?
Let’s say you carelessly drop Ted Kennedy’s health care plan on your foot, and it breaks your toe. In the old days, you’d go to your doctor (or, indeed, believe it or not, have him come to you), he’d patch you up, and you’d write him a check. That’s the way it was in most of the developed world within living memory. Now, under the guise of “insurance,” various third parties intercede between the doctor and your checkbook, and to this the government proposes adding a massive federal bureaucracy, in the interests of “controlling costs.”
The British National Health Service is the biggest employer not just in the United Kingdom but in the whole of Europe. Care to estimate the size and budget of a U.S. health bureaucracy?
Once you get childhood mortality under control and observe basic hygiene and lifestyle precautions, the health “system” is relatively marginal. One notes that, even in Somalia, which still has high childhood mortality, not to mention a state of permanent civil war, functioning government has entirely collapsed and yet life expectancy has increased from 49 to 55. Maybe if government were to collapse entirely in Washington, our life expectancy would show equally remarkable gains. Just thinking outside the box here.
In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence – i.e., they’re in the bathroom 12 times a night – wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure.
Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.
I get a lot of mail each week arguing that, when folks see the price tag attached to Obama’s plans, they’ll get angry. Maybe. But, if Europe’s a guide, at least as many people will retreat into apathy. Once big government’s in place, it’s very hard to go back.
You are absolutely right! Health care in the U.S. is just fine. The right people have access, all the others are just lazy and don’t deserve it!