Why Government-Run Health Care is a Bad Idea

Do we really want to exchange our current #1 health care system (for patient care and access) in the world, where our doctors are free to try experimental treatments (continually moving forward with all the medical breakthroughs we're blessed to have today) and work with us on pursuing treatments regardless of our age for a system where we are nothing more but a "cost" to be "cut" and the doctors we see and treatments we receive are pre-determined by a beaurocratic government board? My answer is a resounding NO!!!

I don't know anybody who thinks government-run health care is a great idea, and yet Congress is trying to rush through yet another ridiculously long bill as though their pants are on fire. Americans are finally beginning to revolt, as evidenced by Senator Specter's reception yesterday in a Town Hall meeting he held with Kathleen Sebellius in Philadelphia.

There are others as well, like this well-spoken soldier demanding an apology from his Senator for not fighting *against* nationalized health care (or "health control") which he correctly notes is not in the list of enumerated powers of the federal government.

Is our health care system in this country imperfect? Certainly. But to look to the government to provide perfection is supreme foolishness. Its obvious that a "single-payer" system is where this legislation will take us. Obama says this himself in this video as recently as 2007 and 2008 even though he is currently saying that we can "keep our private health insurance". Watch the video; its an outright lie, because private insurance will not continue to exist and they DO NOT INTEND for it to continue to exist.



As Americans, we ought to have the right to choose and pay for our own darn health care! I don't *want* to be a ward of the government against my will. I don't trust the government. I've never seen anything that the government managed well, and I sure as heck don't want them managing my health care so that I become a "burden of the state", to be refused any experimental or expensive treatments, to be put on a waiting list, to be given pills and told to go home, to have government counselors helping me learn how to die so that I can cease being a burden on the government. When I'm no longer contributing taxes, what possible value do I have to a giant bureaucratic government, when it is actually in their best interests for me to die?

What gives anyone the idea that government could possibly have their best interests in mind? If you do, just watch Obama's response to a woman who asked if her elderly mother would have been able to receive the pacemaker that prolonged her life by 5 years (and counting) under his plan -- he basically tells her that they can't make subjective decisions, there will be cutoffs in treatments determined by age, and that maybe her mother should just have taken painkillers. Hmmm. That's not the guy I want at my hospital bed-side.

The sad thing is that many Americans don't realize how good we have it. As Paul Krugman painfully discovers in this 22 second video where he goes "off-script" to actually ask the Canadians in the audience, Canadians *do* think their single-payer health care system is terrible. Which is why so many of them come to the United States and pay "out-of-pocket" to get the life-saving treatments they cannot receive in Canada. You too would pay as much as you could afford to save your life or the life of a family member when the government denies treatment or puts you on a waiting list for care. And you would be glad to do it.

Rasmussen Reports finds this morning that 48% of Americans think that our health care system "as it is currently" is good or excellent. Only 19% thought it was poor. There isn't anybody in our country who can't go to an emergency room and receive treatment, even those who are here illegally. While its true that there were 46.6 million people without health insurance in 2006, about 9.5 million of those were not U.S. citizens, another 17 million lived in households making enough income to afford it if they wanted it, 18 million were between the ages of 18 and 34 (most of whom were in good health and not necessarily in need of health-care coverage or chose not to purchase it), and only 30% of the nonelderly population who became uninsured in a given year remained uninsured for more than 12 months (almost 50% of them regained health coverage within four months). Our health care system is certainly imperfect, but it is still the *best* in the world.

John Stossel on ABC's 20/20 shows in this video how nationalizing health care necessarily kills the innovation that leads to medical breakthroughs, which is something I don't think a lot of Americans realize or are thinking about clearly. The reason we have the most medical breakthroughs in this country is because there is a *payoff* (profit) for it, and no, its not *free*. Of lesser interest is the fact highlighted toward the end of the video that if you are a pet or animal in Canada, you can receive treatments immediately -- its only human beings that have to wait several months for care. Wonderful.

One other thing that I have yet to understand is how, with Medicare and Medicaid both essentially set to go completely broke in future years (not even including the Social Security debacle), people somehow buy into the idea that we can cover even more millions of people and that it will cost less??? Having managed a household budget for many years now, I'm aware that the only way to cut costs is to spend wisely and *get* less and *lower* quality. We know the government is incapable of spending wisely. What remains then is for us to receive less care of significantly lower quality, with no other options. On this, I trust my instincts. Government-Run healthcare is not just a "bad idea", its a full-blown nightmare.