Say "NO" to Nationalized Medicine

Dr. Gary Forsythe, professor of Ancient History at Texas Tech University, wrote this to be published here. What an honor!

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In recent times one of the biggest issues cooked up by members of
the professional political class is the need to establish a
national health program to cover all U.S. citizens. In doing so
the U.S.A. would join other advanced Western countries such as
Canada and the United Kingdom. Although health care is not
guaranteed in the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, these
politicians argue that it should be regarded as a basic right.
They keep telling us that there are forty or more million people in
the U.S.A. who are living without any form of health insurance, and
that this situation is intolerable.

First of all, it could be equally argued that since no human being
can survive without water, why don't the politicians raise our
taxes to create a federal bureaucracy that redistributes the tax
money in order to make sure that every single U.S. citizen's monthly
water bill has been paid? Secondly, when stressing the horror of
having so many people uninsured, the politicians fail to mention
that a significant portion of the people being included in this
number are illegal aliens. Thus, if the number of illegal aliens
were to be subtracted out of the uninsured, the figure would be
substantially reduced. Another large component of the uninsured
are people under the age of 35 or so, who are very healthy and have
decided that they do not wish to fork out a chunk of their monthly
income for health coverage. Why should they when our permissive
society forces others to pick up their medical tab? This group of
the young uninsured by choice are much more interested in using
that money for making their monthly payment for their nice car,
having a cellphone with all the up-to-date bells and whistles, as
well as having satellite dish TV and buying DVD's of the most
current movies. In the current climate of our permissive culture,
in which few are ever forced to own up to their actions and
decisions, if a young uninsured citizen is in need of health
services, many automatically cry out that it must be given to them,
and the hospital and other patients will simply have to pay the
bill, because after all that is simply the kind hearted thing to
do, even if in the end a policy may result in the hospital having
to close its doors because it has gone bankrupt. Indeed, this is
what has happened to a number of hospitals in southern California
that have been inundated by illegal aliens who are required by law
to be treated.

What would happen if it were an established fact in our society
that if someone shows up at a hospital in need of care and has no
insurance coverage, services will be denied? Would most people not
organize their lives so as to make sure that they had at least some
form of health coverage? Politicians are constantly forcing us to
modify our lives and spending habits by taxing certain activities
and giving tax breaks for others. If the expectation just outlined
were to be part of our culture, young people might have to do
without their cherished celphone and all its costly features, or go
without having satellite dish TV, or not be able to keep adding to
their DVD collection of movies, but why should hospitals and their
other patients be forced to pay other people's bills when many of
them could afford health care if only they reconfigured their
lives?

If there still remained a considerable number of uninsured people
after we eliminate the illegal aliens and the self-indulgent young
from the equation, many things could be done far short of national
health care for everyone in order to make sure that these people
had affordable health care, and it would not require coming up with
a solution that is analogous to killing an ant with an atomic bomb.
Doctors and hospital staff are already groaning under all the
mandates imposed upon them by the goverment. What we need is less
government intrution, not more, and far more sensible and
intelligent solutions to target specific groups and their needs
rather than creating yet another enormously vast and inefficient
federal bureaucracy to try to dole out hhealth care to everyone.

If you are perfectly happy with the poor quality of education
regularly churned out by the public school system in the U.S., for
which the federal government bears a large share of the blame, then
you will love what the federal government will do to everyone's
health care if it is nationalized. Within a decade or two services
will become so degraded that many people will look back upon the
previous period as a golden age, but by then it will be too late,
because as history clearly demonstrates, once a huge government
bureaucracy is established, it is virtually impossible to do
anything to it other than to make minor modifications and
superficial reforms. If health care were to become the
responsibility of a federal program, it would constitute one of the
largest power grabs in U.S. history, because overnight the federal
government would be seizing control of about one-seventh of the
entire U.S. economy. Do not believe anything a politician says
about how much their nationalized health care plan is going to
cost. When was the last time that you heard of a federal program
coming in under budget and staying there? It never happens.
Feeding us such lies is a slick way of convincing some people that
it really will not cost all that much. In addition, these same
politicians insist that the program will be paid by going after big
rich corporations, as if the latter do not employ large numbers of
ordinary people whose jobs may be put in jeopardy by federal
confiscatory tax policies implemented to soak the rich. These
statements are nothing more than demagogery calculated to persuade
the gullible to get behind the idea, but then when the program is
established, and it is too late to reverse course, politicians will
shed crocodile tears in telling us how much more expensive it has
now become; and although they really hate to do so, they are going
to have to increase our taxes significantly to pay for it all. A
nationalized health program will soon begin to consume an
absolutely gigantic portion of the U.S. budget and will make it
very difficult for us to afford other things. No matter what a
politician may promise, taxes will have to be increased
significantly in order to pay for it. It will also place a heavier
burden upon employers; and all these increased expenses will soon
begin to result in slow economic growth generally. The program
will act as a sever choke hold around the neck of the capitalistic
goose that has been laying for us the golden eggs responsible for
the greatest economic system in world history. It will condemn the
U.S. to a stagnant economy similar to the United Kingdom. Small
businesses have long been the most important area fostering
economic growth in the U.S., but imposing larger costs upon them
will make it much harder for these businesses to come into being;
and others already in existence may have to close, because they
cannot afford the increased expenses; and others will have to lay
people off in order to economize. There will be very many adverse
economic consequences of nationalized health care, and of course,
no politician selling the idea will ever mention them, but that
assumes that they are even sufficiently educated in matters of
economics to realize that there will be such consequences. All
that they will do is paint such a rosy picture of the grass being
greener on the other side that many people, like dumb beasts, will
want to jump over the fence and get into that pasture where the
grass is supposed to be greener and tastier.

Given what you know about how politicians manage our tax dollars,
how well do you think that their nationalized health program will
spend our hard earned money? We already have one good example from
the Clinton administration. Indeed, how many people even remember
this? It serves as an excellent illustration of how short most
people's memories are, and how that fact is constantly being
exploited by politicians, because they can come up with one idea,
impliment a program, and have it function poorly, but since most
people forget such things, the same politicians can come right back
at us with their newest idea and program that functions just as
badly as their other one with no accountability ever being exacted
from the programs' proposers. But to return to the main subject,
when Hillary Clinton, the self-appointed and self-anointed expert
in health care, decided that the federal government must take over
the responsibility of having all school-age children immunized
against common childhood diseases, the federal government
established what manufacturers of vaccines could charge, but since
it provided the producers with virtually no profit margin, all of
them decided "why bother?" They simply stopped producing the
vaccines, and the federal government had to go abroad to the U.K.
to buy up millions of vaccines. Then what happened? it turned out
that many of the vaccines were defective and could not be used.
What a classic clusterfuck produced by well intentioned politicians
with no knowledge of how things work in the real economic world!
After leaving his career in politics, George McGovern, a leading
liberal U.S. senator from South Dakota who went down to the worst
electoral defeat as president in 1972, decided to establish in his
retirement a small bed and breakfast tourist business in the
Northeast. When he was confronted with all the regulations
required of him by the government, he was heard to remark that if
he had known this as a senator, his voting record would have been
much different. In fact, a large proportion of politicians at the
federal level have been nothing more but politicians for their
entire adult lives and have had little, if any, real-world
experience in organizing and operating a business enterprise. The
case of the vaccines during the Clinton administration is all too
typical of politicians in their arrogance, thinking that by their
laws and policies they can control fundamental market forces of the
economy, as if they could pass a law forbidding gravity to operate
in nature, or prohibiting tornados from occurring. Free market
forces will continue to operate, no matter what politicians in
Washington D.C. do; and if the latters' policies are in obvious
defiance of such irrepressible forces, the result will be like a
freight train smashing into a car parked on the railroad tracks;
and all the good intentions of the politicians, based upon faulty
economic logic, will be utterly destroyed. In the former Soviet
Union, where all aspects of the economy were controlled by the
government, everyone in theory had a job, so that unlike the evil
capitalist countries, the Soviet Union never suffered from
unemployment, and every worker received a pay-check. It did not
matter that much of the work being done was of dubious economic
value, as was the pay-checks doled out, but it at least allowed the
government to boast to the outside world that everyone was employed
and received a pay-check. In this supposed workers' paradise the
common joke among the general population was that "we pretend to
work, and they pretend to pay us."

Consider the following facts concerning national health care in
Canada and the United Kingdom, which the politicians are always
holding before us as the example that we backward citizens of the
U.S. should be following. Recently a survey in the U.K discovered
that six percent of it citizens were using glue and pliers to
administer their own dental care, because they could not be
scheduled to see a dentist to tend to their teeth. The N. H.S.
(Britain's National Health Service) also released a formal
pronouncement saying that they were incapable of giving all
pregnant women services for delivering their children, so taht
those who were not in immediate danger should seek out the services
of private midwives. The same N.H.S. also recently reported that
they could not keep all the hospitals equipped with clean bed
sheets. How is that for maintaining a sanitary environment?
Besides these clear illustrations of the N.H.S. to supply
everyone's needs, there are constantly coming into the news stories
of persons having to wait months or even years to receive needed
operations. In fact, the situation has become so severe in the
U.K. that another recent survey has reported that its citizens are
leaving in record numbers to travel abroad to find doctors to
service their needs. A few years ago a report was in the news
concerning Canada's system, which some U.S. politicians regard as
vastly superior to that in our lower 48 states. According to this
report, although it is illegal for private medical clinics to exist
in Canada, they were coming into being on a regular basis to
provide services that the state sponsored program was failing to
deliver; and even though such activity was illegal, the government
was doing nothing to stop it, because it realized that the
government system clearly needed help by such privately owned and
operated clinics.

Perhaps the most horrific story that has surfaced in the news
lately concerning the N.H.S. in the U.K. is the following. A man
had an accident resulting in his foot being broken. When he sought
to have it tended to through the N.H.S., he was denied treatment.
Why? He was a smoker, and the N.H.S. insisted that he stop smoking
as a condition for him receiving medical care. He replied that he
had in fact tried to stop, but he simply could not manage to do it.
This is a perfect illustration of how a nationalized system can
intrude itself into people's lives in all sorts of unwelcome and
oppressive ways. We have already seen in recent years in this
country how a large team of trial lawyers successfully sued the
tobacco companies by arguing that they owed the U.S. public
billions and billions of dollars for health care costs. Juries and
judges bought their argument, and the trial lawyers and state
governments enjoyed gigantic windfalls of cash forced out of the
tobacco industry. How much of that money was then spent on health
care? Very little. The issue of increasing numbers of people
being overweight has been in the news for months and months. If a
national health plan were created, what would stop a small number
of its zealous administrators from deciding that they needed to use
their coercive power to give or deny health care in order to force
people to go on diets, to exercise several times a week, and to
give up ice cream, doughnuts, candy bars, potato chips, etc., etc.,
etc.?

If health care is akin to a civil right, why isn't having daily
food to consume? We already do have various programs to provide
the needy with the means of buying food, but so far at least, we do
not have a nationalized grocery plan for all citizens. Using the
analogy of a nationalized health plan, why doesn't the government
simply nationalize all grocery stores and allow everyone to go in
to take what they want? Obviously, this would result in many
grocery stores going bankrupt and out of business. In addition, it
would give the government the power to dictate what people should
or should not eat. one can easily imagine a time when government
employees stand guard at what used to be the check-out lines, where
they oversee what we are taking out of the store; and their job is
to tell us, "you can't have that half gallon of ice cream. You
already look too fat to me. Instead, take this bag of carrots."

This may sound too strange to be believable, but is it? The record
of human history is quite clear in showing that the one thing that
bureaucracies are best at is perpetuating themselves and making
sure that they continue to grow and exercise more and more power.
In addition, of course, they are always very inefficient
economically and become increasingly costly as they grow in size.
Recently in California some politicians have come up with the idea
of having all thermostats in homes and businesses controlled from
a central authority that decides how warm or how cold the place
should be, so that the government can regulate people's energy
consumption.

A nationalized health plan in the U.S. would be a truly gigantic
step down the road of socialism from which it would be very hard to
retreat. Someone has said that communism is simply socialism in a
hurry: that is to say, whatever or whoever (and it might be
millions of ordinary people) stands in the way of establishing
communism is simply run over and destroyed, because the end in such
cases is regarded as justifying the means. Conversely, socialism
could be called communism in increments, communism on the
installment plan, or communism in slow motion.

I truly fear the establishment of nationalized health care in this
cuntry that I love so dearly, because I see it as undermining the
basic economic health of our society that has produced the largest
and most affluent middle class in all of human history. I really
dread to see the day when this begins to be eroded. I truly hope
that if or when that begins to happen, I will be dead and cannot
witness it. I am convinced that contrary to what the politicians
maintain, nationalized health care will be one of the worst things
ever to befall this nation. It is simply their most recent brand
of snake oil medicine that they are hawking to justify their
continued existence as people needing to be kept in power to solve
all our horrible problems to fix things even when they are not
really broken.

Besides causing economic ruin, national health care will result in
just the opposite of what the uninformed members of the public are
being told that it will accomplish. Rather than delivering good
health care to all, it will degrade the quality of health care for
almost everyone, as has been abundantly shown by the workings of
the systems in the U.K. and Canada, which, of course, U.S.
politicians and their fellow travelers in TV journalism are careful
to hide from us.

Finally, another national health care program that receives the
highest praise from these same U.S. politicians and journalists is,
of course, that of communist Cuba under the rule of that dictator
Fidel, whom many on the lunatic left in the U.S. worship as an
icon. We are told how wonderful health care is in that supposed
island utopia, where it is hard to buy almost anything, including
tooth paste, toilet paper, and female sanitary napkins. If their
system is so wonderful as the U.S. left are constantly telling us,
why isn't Cuba being plagued by illegal aliens wanting to get in?
Why instead are there so many illegal aliens flooding into this
country? There is the old adage that imitation is the sincerest
form of flattery. I have heard this adapted to be "immigration is
the sincerest form of flattery." I do not want to see a time when,
like in the present-day U.K., numerous citizens are leaving their
country to travel abroad to seek much needed medical care. Our
current system may not be perfect, because no human institution
ever is; but the health delivery system in the U.S. is outstanding
and is certainly not broken. it does not need to be fixed by a
gang of damn politicians in Washington D.C., who are so full of
good intentions, but whose knowledge of basic economics and history
is profound. When was the last time that they created a large
government program that really fixed a serious problem and did it
well without creating other unforeseen problems that enabled the
same politicians to create additional costly government programs as
remedies for the messes that the initial program created?

You can be sure that if politicians ever do succeed in persuading
enough of the U.S. public to go along with nationalized health
care, one feature of the program will be that all federal employees
(or at least all elected officials) are exempt from it, and that
there will be allowance made for a special group of clinics
(lavishly funded by our tax dollars, of course) whose sole function
will be to provide the politicians with the highest quality of
health care, while everyone else must settle for what they can
obtain from the Frankenstein that they have created and imposed
upon us.

Comments

[Daniel]

low cost dental treatment abroad for veneers, crowns and implants can be booked almost immediately through http://www.dentalholiday.co.uk english speaking staff, aacd accredited.

[Alex Nunns]

Hi,

As an Englishman I'd just like to correct a few of the wild inaccuracies relating the the British National Health Service in this blog.

I note that no references were provided for the NHS scare stories, but I'll take them one by one.

1. People pulling out their own teeth - this example actually argues against the thesis of this blog, as the people who are pulling their teeth out are people who do not have an NHS dentist. It is the cost of private care and insurance that is forcing such action. Dentistry is not fully covered by the NHS, which is a disgrace, and what people here want are more nationalised dentists, not less.

2. It is certainly not true that anyone is denied an NHS midwife - every citizen is entitled to give birth on the NHS.

3. The story about insufficient numbers of bedsheets didn't even make the news here, so I suspect it isn't true. (In any case NHS supplies are actually administered by US company Novation, amid much protest.)

4. Waiting lists are massively down and no one waits for years.

5. A very small number of people are travelling to Europe, especially France, for some operations. This has more to do with European integration and has nothing to do with nationalised health - indeed every major European country has a nationalised health system. In fact a major political issue in Britain is the number of immigrants coming to the UK to use the NHS.

6. As for the smoker who couldn't get treated for a broken foot, this is clearly untrue. A broken bone would be treated in Accident and Emergency where there are no entitlement criteria.

Aside from suspect anecdotes, here is the real comparison:

Britain spends 8% of its Gross Domestic Product on healthcare, and the NHS covers everybody. The US spends 16%, yet 45 million people have no insurance.

In every major study Britain ranks as a far more healthy society than the US, and the British health system a far fairer and more comprehensive service than the American one. The Commonwealth Fund in New York found that the poorest Britons are healthier than the richest Americans.

There is a reason why the US is the only developed country not to have a civilised healthcare system!

Alex Nunns

[Marcus Scott]

Wow. Impressively sustained conservative rant. There are a few decent points made here (like the story of McGovern - assuming it is true), but mostly it's just an unfocused tirade that tries to wedge in all points of American right wing politics into a narrow argument on health care. First of all, how hard would it be to provide a little documentation or hyperlinks to all the "studies" to which you refer? Secondly, please proofread your article before submission for publication to avoid all the embarrassing typos and misspelling that I would think a professor would abhor. Not that spelling is the point here, but if you want to be taken seriously, you must conquer these basic elements of writing (particularly citation) that are usually taught at any public, i.e. federally funded University. I think that there is a strong argument to be made against national health care, but this is not it.