Government can fix health care. Sure it can. Just ask the Democrats in the Senate. They’ll tell you.
What they won’t discuss is the sad, proven fact that government’s fat paw stuck into any endeavor makes it more costly, less efficient, and far less accountable to the people it purports to serve.
Ask them about Medicaid, the government coverage for low income families. Are the “customers” (as the bureaucrats term Medicaid recipient) healthy? Nope.
Oh, never mind what they say. Look at Social Security instead. No, wait. Have a stiff drink first. That link is a double whammy, showing you the additional fragility of Medicare.
All right, all right, so Social Security’s not so great and Medicare isn’t feeling well. But how about our streamlined, efficient United States Postal Service? The one that’s planning to close on Saturdays to save money. They’re a good example of an institution that doesn’t care because it doesn’t have to. It’s a government monopoly that would be out of business tomorrow if competition were permitted.
Well then, how about our subsidized rail system, the money-eater otherwise known as Amtrak? What a long strange trip (and rip-off) it’s been since 1970…
Maybe Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are your own personal friends? Anybody home?
Government creates corruption and larger government creates larger corruption. That is a sad fact that the Left will never accept. How’s that War on Poverty going? How about the War on Drugs? Or the war on guns?
We already have many sad examples of the heavy hand of government health care. But don’t take my word for it. Ask the Indians who are at the mercy of the Indian “Health” Services. If you want to see living examples of why we need to keep government limited, as Ira Taken-Alive says in this video, “Go to the Reservation”:
Here’s what a Maine citizen says about the Indian Health Services:
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We do not need to compare the universal health-care system in Canada and England to know what government run health-care will be like in the United States. All we have to do is look at the health care our government is provides American Indians.
The Indian Health Service currently spends about the same per Native American as Finland, Spain and other countries Obama has said demonstrate that we can spend less and get better outcomes.
How is this working for them? Rates of infant mortality, heart disease, HIV/AIDS and liver cancer are significantly higher than among non-hispanic whites, and diabetes-related deaths are four times higher. On one reservation in South Dakota, life expectancy in 2007 was 58 years, while the national average is 77 years.
The motto on reservations is “don’t get sick after June” because that’s when federal money usually runs out. In addition, fraud, waste and mismanagement are problems.
A number of tribes are now moving away from the IHS system and doing tribal contracting, where they provide their own health-care funding from the IHS. They now administer their own hospitals and clinics and wind up with better access and better quality care.
Want to know what a public option will be like? Ask a Native American. How could our senators and congressmen support this treatment of any U.S. citizen?
Here’s the governor of South Dakota quoted in the Rapid City Journal:
South Dakotans who like the idea of more government involvement in medical care need only look at the Indian Health Service to see how easily things can go wrong, Gov. Mike Rounds says.
“Right now in South Dakota, we’ve got one of the best examples of a health-care system run amok, and that is Indian health,” Rounds said in an interview with the Journal. “And I wouldn’t wish that health care on anybody. It would be an absolute disaster in America.”
I have visited Native American friends in Indian health care facilities…and it’s pretty bad. I’m just talking about the physical condition of the buildings, not the wait times, quality of care, etc., which are a whole other story.
You might recall the scandal a few years ago when the terrible conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (paint peeling off the walls, etc.) were revealed. Well, military and veteran heath care isn’t the only U.S. government health care that is pathetic. I’ve seen the same kind of peeling paint, etc. in government-run Indian Health Service facilities as well.
Then we have the lessons from various state-run health care insurance:
A 2008 analysis by Kaiser Permanente’s Patricia Lynch published by Health Affairs noted that in addition to Washington and New York, the individual insurance markets in Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Vermont “deteriorated” after the enactment of guaranteed issue. Individual insurance became significantly more expensive and there was no significant decrease in the number of uninsured.
Our imperial Congress suffers from a bad case of over reach. They want to encase the body politic in a disastrous full body cast and tell us how good it feels. Will they themselves be partaking of this “health” “care” “plan”? Heavens no! The nomenklatura has its own insurance plan and you can bet that no one will be permitted to touch it. Nor will we mere citizens be permitted to partake of the same benefits.
What’s the point of running for elective office if you can’t avail yourself of the exclusive perks belonging only to the imperium?
Hat tip: Frugal Café
Dymphna, Obama and his fellows are gonna have their way. Maybe not now, n not in his term, I wouldnt bet butI trust the Americans this much, myabe another Reagan will arise, but sooner or later it will happen.
look at the American schools. look at the clipe CNN released the other day with the multicultural bunch singing songs to the Dear Leader. This is just the beginning.
What interests me, to whom are the people arround the world, looking for libery, if you want, are going to look for example? well…
propaganda in the public schools has been going on for a loooong time-it is now out in the open…
hopefully the avalanche of the slide is not too late and we in the US will now be ever watchful…
Indian Health Services.
I went to school and lived in Northern Arizona for many years and even though it was in the
1970s, IHS had a bad rap back
then and deservedly so. I was
in Flagstaff which is very close
to the Navajo and Hopi Indian
reservations. There were quite a few native American students at
NAU, the university I graduated from. I had several friends who
were Native American and if they
or their family members got ill
or injured, the IHS clinics were
the LAST place these people would
go to for medical or dental care.
They would most times, drive for
several hours if they had to for
proper medical care off the
reservations. The stories of mistreatments and missed
diagnosis were horrific.
Many of these stories I heard
ended withn the death of the
family member, friend or they
ended up disabled for life or a very long time. Many chronic
conditions and diseases were
rampant on the reservations and
that has not changed much except
for those Native Americans that
have taken over their own health
care and not depend on IHS.
Is this what we want for health care? As a diasbaled man with a family and not a great yearly income many would think I would
be in favor of a gov’t run health
care plan. But I am not in favor
of Obamacare or gov’t health care
at all. Dealing with Workman’s
Comp, Medicare and Social Security
have made sure this is not what
I want for me or my family. I
am speaking from experience here
and this is not the way we want
this to go down for health care.
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Totalitarians of all types communists/socialists, Fascists etc, want a populace that is quiet and subservient. To achieve this it is necessary to make the public, or at least large parts of it, reliant on the state. In the recent past, this was done by force, and this is still the case in non-democratic states. In states that have a modicum of freedom, it becomes necessary to make people reliant on the state for as many things as possible, using a possible good cause as an excuse. In the UK, this has taken the form of the NHS (life and death issue), and the huge expansion of the non wealth-producing sector of the economy – civil service. Nationalised health is easier to promote, as who can oppose good health for every one? The NHS is also useful for an ever-increasing bureaucracy, and is hidden within the National Health Service (Two birds with one stone). The NHS has further advantages
1. Doctors and nurses, and all the civil servants in the NHS, have well paid jobs that are also secure, and have inflation proof pensions. These people can be relied to vote for continuation of the scheme.
2. It allows big pharmacy companies to make huge profits, and give large donations, and other goodies to politicians.
The political elite then can farm out the business of running the country to a big bureaucracy (the EU comes to mind), then live in million dollar dachas and villas, drive and fly around, all at taxpayer’s expense, and behave like celebrities.
To help in this “mother of all scams”, in the UK, we also have a state funded broadcaster that is systemically against the free enterprise.
The other possible good cause that Western politicians have seized on is Global warming (like the Lisbon treaty it has undergone a name change, and is now known as Climate change). This totally unjustified scare mongering is being used to destroy industry and wealth producing sectors of the economy, so that people have to rely on the state. It stands to reason that with much less wealth to go around, people will have to live in poverty, and thus even more reliant on the state.
The real problem, however, is simple : a majority of American youths are totalitarians. “If everyone did as I say there would be peace” has gone from stupidity and major sin to axiom.
It’s that simple.
Hmm. More gov’t health care equals less health? I guess we’d better get rid of the Veterans Administration, then, including Tricare. And Medicare, and Medicaid. And with it, a whole lot of nursing homes, which would fail without Medicaid’s “Title 19.”
The people who want the government out of health care should be consistent about it across the board.
As for “less health,” then what about Canada, where they spend five-eighths what we do as a share of their national income, with superior overall outcomes?
Delays in Canada, you will say. And there aren’t rampant delays here, even for the insured, while the bureaucrats in the efficient private sector scheme to collect premiums and deny claims?
The government’s role is to step in when the free markets fail. Which they regularly do.
United States Postal Service? The one that’s planning to close on Saturdays to save money.
Actually, I think this is somewhat off the mark. Not that government efficiency is amazing – but there’s something else at play here. We have a similar problem with postal services – and many other services – in Denmark, where endless cutbacks and rationalizations press the workers to their limits, without ever reducing the end-user prices.
This takes place in hospitals, in transportation and many other places. They are gaining efficiency – but that gain is lost somewhere else, in the hidden inflation.
? CPI has been pretty stable recently?
No – but that’s another story. What matters here is that we actually have falling prices on a lot of stuff – cheap Chinese imports etc., and rising prices on services and other products that cannot easily be rationalized by investing in better manufacturing processes.
The real inflation is the growth in the money supply, which is somewhere between 5 and 15 % a year. That is putting the squeeze on services.
The fix is to stop the money-printing. But that, too, would by necessity lead to less government (and less finance). Much less.