Not What The Doctor Ordered
By Tony DiPasquale (07/20/04)
Imagine you are in a restaurant with your family and another family walks in and sits at the table beside yours. Both of you are enjoying your meals and the time spent with your families, but then a strange thing happens. At the end of the meal, the waiter hands you a bill for both families’ meals and, despite your objections, demands that you pay up. Is this fair? Well, John Kerry and many Democrats want you to believe this is just the type of “fairness” needed to improve healthcare.
We have to give the Democrats credit for one thing, it seems as if every election cycle we are revisiting the idea of a national healthcare system, aka socialized medicine. It is amazing how so many people when they hear the word socialism still think of it with negative connotations, yet they seem more than willing to embrace many of its characteristics like income redistribution and yes, socialized healthcare.
Advocates would like you to believe that there is no downside to a national system, citing lower per capita costs and universal coverage. What they neglect to reveal are the long waiting lines associated with government run healthcare, the outdated equipment, and often times, poor service. There have even been cases in Canada of hospitals that are so overcrowded that they had to turn away patients. Does this sound like a solution to our current problems, cutting services and quality?
No answer to the problem of skyrocketing healthcare rates will be easy. The first area that needs to be addressed is the concept of the third-payee system itself. For some reason when purchasing other forms of insurance, consumers understand the trade-off between the amount of a deductible one carries and the corresponding premium. So why do so many people believe that healthcare should not have such a provision? All of us have heard someone complain about co-pays, yet this is a valuable step towards controlling costs. An even better idea would be advocating the increased use of catastrophic care coverage, which covers a patient for bills over a certain level, and then having the patient become responsible for smaller fees like doctor visits. Consumers would find that this coverage is far more affordable and would also result in an increased awareness on the part of the patient towards costs.
Of course, opponents would say that healthcare is not a place where budgeting should take place, but that is exactly what will happen if the government gets any more of a grip on it. Besides, I know I would rather be the one to decide where some belt tightening should take place rather than having some bureaucrat do it.
Frequently, tests that might not be necessary are done, not so much to protect the patient, but for the doctor to protect his rear end. With all the news of gargantuan jury awards, many doctors are acting overly cautious by having all these tests done in order to protect them should they ever end up in court. Some have called for limiting awards, but this can be excessively harsh treatment in some cases where the doctor has acted with gross negligence.
If the Democrats have their way, and I believe that at our current pace it is inevitable, and are able to institute a form of socialized medicine, it will be the death-knell for conservatism in this country as an entire new batch of dependents will have been created. Does this seem far-fetched? Social Security is a good example. Just look at how timid politicians are about doing anything to this system today. The difference with health care will be that the beneficiaries of the program will not be limited to a segment of the population; it will encompass all the citizens. Then again, if a number of the politicians on Capital Hill have their way it will include illegals too.
Do not think for a moment that the Democrats are oblivious to the impact a health care system would have on their constituency. You can bet that every election year will be filled with the rants of Democrats saying how Republicans want to cut your healthcare. It happens all the time in England.
Still, we are told that health care is just too important, that it should be a right. Well, food and shelter are important as well. In fact, I would suggest that you could live a lot longer without health care than you could without food and shelter. Should it be our responsibility to pay for our neighbor’s food and shelter too?
This is supposed to be the land of the free, yet people have forgotten what freedom actually means. Freedom does not mean having someone else pay for life’s necessities. Freedom involves responsibility to ourselves, our families, and the downtrodden in society. If we have fallen to a level of morality that prevents us from helping those in need, and our current levels of giving prove that this is not the case, then we cannot possibly hope to preserve our freedoms. A nation without morals cannot hope to remain free.
Advocates would like you to believe that this is an acceptable use of government power. Unfortunately, the only result we can be assured of is politicians gaining more control over our lives and more government waste. If we fail to address this problem today, we will inevitably take that great leap towards socialism in the very near future. As Reagan once said, “… government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
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