More Comments on fixing health care

A dialog on healthcare reform with someone who wants a universal system so they will be "covered."

Yeah, we need healthcare reform all right: get the government out of our pockets and out of our lives. I don't have insurance, and I have medical issues - but there is absolutely no way I would authorize the government to come to your house and take your money to pay for my medical care. And you should not support the immorality of authorizing government thugs to come to my house and beat the crap out of me until I give up money to pay for yours. Both of us are losers when government transfers money from one citizen to another and then dictates every aspect of our lives. That is where this is going.

The strait jacket of Socialized healthcare is a one-way street - a dead end, not only for our healthcare industry, but for our entire system of Liberty under Law, and free enterprise.

I did my homework and I can plainly see where this is going. I am utterly oppposed to it. It is not about heathcare; it is a power grab.

But to your point:

"Everybody needs to be covered so that they access to treatment" - that is a pipe dream! Who is going to pay for it? where are the additional doctors going to come from? how can the system we have now be able to take on millions of additional people who want a hammock instead of being responsible for themselves? There is no such thing as universal access without rationing, higher and higher costs, lower and lower service, and eventual bankrupcy of the system, and oh, by the way, loss of Liberty.

Aesop's fables tells of a hog rooting acorns at the base of the tree which produced the acorns. When confronted with the fact that he was killing the tree by digging up the roots of the tree, he replied: "I don't care as long as I have acorns."

No one has any claim on me or what I earn to fulfill some "need" they have. Sorry, Karl Marx might approve, but a much higher authority decreed that charity is voluntary not mandatory. And I opt out. No I am not wealthy. In fact I do have affordable catastrophic insurance for some "biggies" - but if the bill runs to the hundreds of thousands, I am out of money. Despite that fact, I still don't think I have a presumptive claim on you to pay for my exorbitant medical bills either.

This becomes emotional because of the high cost of medical care. Why is it so high? It is driven by government. Socialist Medicare and Medicaid have already done a number on us, bribing the elderly (and many younger folk) with the idea that they have a "right" to unlimited medical care - far beyond any contributions they might have made.

This is so sad. Millions of people look first and in some cases, only to the government (nanny state) to "fix" their need for medical care. It is sad because we once had a genuine free enterprise medical system, but we have mostly given it away in the name of subsidized medical care - we are more than fifty percent there now, and many folks don't even realize it, but feel that what we have now is free enterprise.

Somehow, in those "bad old days" when I was a young married man and had my first child, the bill was about $450, all in; hospital stay and all. 1967. Inflation aside, you can't have a baby today for less than, I would guess $10,000. What has changed?

Everyone got in on dipping into the vast river of federal subsidy dollars, and the lawyers' guild got in on the liability lawsuit game (assisted by lots of low-ethics people who wanted to get independently wealthy through frivolous lawsuits), and the insurance companies (yes, they are guilty too) got in on the "let's be regulated" game (it is safer that way, you know!) - and private companies were encouraged by the government to offer (tax deductable to the companies) medical plans to their employees as a perk (thus training them that other people were going to pay for their medical care), and governments at all levels got in on the insurance game for their employees - best in the West!!! No reductions in those plans, no matter whether the government is going bust or not! (n.b. see California)

So here we are with structural rigidities – and unrealistic expectations - built into our system and in many people’s minds, with the main fault being the stimulus starting at the Fed level. Now they want to take over the whole system to “fix” it. But they are the main culprits!

The solution is to dismantle the socialist state, not expend it.

While eating the nuts under the tree, you ought to look up and wonder what is happening to that once-flourishing tree. It is beginning to look kind of sickly. The nuts will run out very suddenly. What will you do then?