Back to something serious, we note with dismay the inability of our body politic to acknowledge reality in the debate about "healthcare" (really health insurance).
Thanking gentle reader and nearly-co-blogger JB in CA for his tip, we offer the incisive commentary of Maggie Gallagher, who lays bare Hillary Clinton's repeated use of a "healthcare" sob story that has all the political virtues except a basis in fact. Of course, Hillary's story about a woman who died after being denied treatment (when in fact she wasn't denied treatment) is her means of suggesting that the enemy death itself can be defeated if only we will let Hillary do What's Right for America. Gallagher nicely lays out the issue of health insurance as it actually exists: if the government controls costs, it also controls supply. If you like the idea of the government rationing something that can save your life, you'll love the Hillary Plan.
Still in denial, but honestly so, is "economist" Paul Krugman, who last week in the Gray Lady seriously offered that government control of healthcare costs would be preferable to market forces. His example? What he styles as the enormously successful Veterans Administration hospital system!* We applaud Krugman for admitting what the rest of us have been saying for a long time: if you want to know what government-funded healthcare will be like, go to the VA.
Krugman decries the fact that Americans spend more on healthcare than anyone else. We'll leave aside the question as to how much of that spending has to do with interference in the market by government and and undersupply of providers created by quasi-governmental professional associations. Instead, we'll celebrate the relative liberty and prosperity that gives Americans the ability to decide to use their huge piles of mammon (that's for you, Rustypants) on healthcare if they want to.
Face it: if you had unlimited cash and limited scruples, you'd spend everything you could to improve your health and forestall your death. That's what Americans are doing. The load of baloney that they're considering is the notion that Uncle Sugar will pay the bill for them with the reckless abandon with which they would personally pay if only they could. If Americans take the Democrats' bargain, Americans will gain nothing in exchange for what liberty they had over their own health.
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*SWNID gratefully asserts that many employees of the VA work hard to make the system work, providing superb personal care whenever they are given the opportunity. SWNID insists that for nearly all veterans, VA hospitals are providers of last resort.
6 comments:
Short anecdote about government provided healthcare:
The wife and I as students are automatically plugged into to the UK's national health service, for which i am generally grateful. Well, my better half developed a nasty little cavity since being here and we decided we needed to see what could be done about it. Months go by as we search for an NHS dentist who is accepting patients (the horror stories about dentistry in Britain are not exaggerated).
Finally, we find a dentist and she goes only to find that the NHS only covers dental work until the age of 19. Now you tell me, on what sort o planet does that make any sense? And the cost should we want to pay out of pocket? $480 for two teeth.
Rule, Britannia!
In the UK the SWNID's traded Greek lessons for dental work from an eager-to-learn Christian dentist. The whole matter was a blessed arrangement for us. The dentist was a fine practitioner by local standards, but the work he did mostly needed to be redone after our return to the colonies.
Those of us without health care would even be willing to use the VA system...and at some point this will reach critical mass, unless someone opens up some options for working people afford to pay for priviate health care. I would like to see a lot more options for ministers/self employed people to buy into optional groups to cut the cost and give some better options. Priviate health care is a lot worse than UK, or almost anywhere else.
The problem with our healthcare is too much government interference (and the wrong kind) not too little. My local hospital wanted to build a proton therapy site for the treatment of cancer. Because another was also being built nearby which was sponsored by a University, they were denied. Appearently we have to keep the supply down in order to keep the cost up. Never mind how many people this facility would help
As an american citizen canadian resident, I see what a red-herring governmental involvement in "healthcare" is. Ultimately, it results in greater regulation and taxation on things that would cost the government run healthcare. (I know a couple reported to social services because they refused vaccination for their child.) If your in for a penny, your in for a pound. Furthermore, government involvement in the healthcare industry reduces the possibility of litigation. While I do not care for ambulance chasers, neither do I care for the prospects of having no recourse toward incompetence.
While persistent in my insistence that we call health insurance what it is and not confuse it with health care, I'll stipulate that "Anonymous" is on to something when he says that we need a means of making health [insurance] more affordable for people who don't have employer-sponsored plans. Bush proposed a step in this direction over a year ago. The Party of Jackson didn't give it a hearing.
It is the accidental linkage of health insurance to employment, largely the consequence of wage controls during WWII, that bedevils our present system.
In the meantime, SWNID recommends careful evaluation of catastrophic health-insurance, much cheaper and more important than comprehensive plans, and the careful evaluation of other cost-saving measures available to those without generous, employer-provided plans.
For the rest, it is of course an expression of desperation to choose the VA system, and it would be an act of malice to consign every citizen of the Republic to have nothing except such a system. And again, as P. J. O'Rourke said so aptly, "If you think that health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free."
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