Here is the problem with government health care.

The underlying rationale is that health care is a right. This sounds good, a common factor in progressive (what Americans commonly call "liberal") schemes. The problem with that is that, unlike human rights, such as those laid forth in the American Bill of Rights, which are deemed to be granted by a power greater than ourselves, health care must be provided by individuals. Real people, not a (perhaps notional) God.

Either there are enough people--health-care workers such as doctors, nurses, and all allied fields--to provide these services, or there are not. If there are not, two things happen. Care is rationed, and/or providers become government workers. They are told whether or not to practice, and what to practice, when, often where, and upon whom to practice medicine. They are also told how much they will be paid for these services. Under "Hillarycare", private practice would even have been outlawed, with criminal sanctions.

Rather than be dictated to and having their potential income limited, many who would otherwise enter the field choose to do other things. (My ex-wife, a health-care professional, was discouraging our three children from going into medicine 15 years ago for this reason.) Many in the field leave it, thus resulting in an inevitable shortage of care--unless they are required to remain, at which point they become highly-skilled slaves.

Why do American politicians insist on trying, in the face of its failure everywhere it has been tried? Apart from the obvious largesse to their largely nonproductive voter base, the American Democrat party has been hijacked by True Believers. These people are capital-C communists in all but name. If you ask them directly--which no one in our mainly leftist press will do--they will simply say that it (universal health care or communism, your choice) has never had a "fair chance", that there were factors preventing it from working elsewhere. Surely we, with our Yankee ingenuity--but guided by the shades of Marx and Vladimir Ilyich---will make it work here.

They thereby ignore, in the name of "compassion", human nature, which has not and will not change, and arrogate unto themselves dictatorial powers to implement their schemes over the objections of the actual majority which is required to pay for it all. (That would be you middle- and upper-middle-class workers and entrepreneurs--far less than 50% of the population--who pay 95% of the income taxes in this country.)

And my signature line, which I used to use here but have never removed from my primary email account, because it never stops being appropriate: "To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child." -Cicero

Those who now propose to lead us into socialized medicine in the name of the greater good are just such children, with all the foresight and awareness of consequences that children have.

Richard Letaw

Last edited by Ryszard; 06/09/09 10:07 AM.
"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."