Former Senator Phil Gramm said it best: "You can't give someone something for nothing unless you give someone nothing for something". And so it is with the notion of universal health care.
First, lets look at what the Obama Administration's own Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects. Beginning with passage and continuing through 2019, the additional fees are virtually offset by the benefits, resulting in a picture perfect pay-as-you-go outcome.
However, the CBO is notorious for its bias in matters of projecting finances, be it spending, deficits or anything else. As an arm of the administration, it is a virtual certainty that some sort of accounting shenanigans have been played in order to "sell" the program to the 60 Senators who extorted the Admistration for various favors in exchage for their YES votes.
According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the plan's most tangible efforts to restrain medical costs occur via restrictions on specialist physicians. Congress will constrain these doctors from employing various "costly" procedures which it has deemed wasteful. But who are we to argue with Congress? They must be right since so many of them are doctors and have NO intention of participating in the plan!
The Senate bill gives the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services the unilateral right to dictate the price and use of medical devices. The Obama administration has attempted to usurp these powers via the court system and LOST (Hays vs Sebelius)!
Furthermore, the Senate bill specifically denies patients the right to sue! Private providers, on the other hand, are held to an entirely different standard.
If for some reason you wish to review the entire plan, you can do so by clicking on the following link http://thomas.loc.gov/. Or, for general information about health reform, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/health_reform/.
So, whether you find my little diatribe brilliant or idiotic, I DOUBLE-DARE you to "Take Me On" in the comments section below. Tomorrow, we'll revisit Gold.
Marko's Take
Socialized medicine is not health "care." It is tyranny.
ReplyDeleteHere's an article that sums up what I believe: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=466
A few salient points:
Health care is not a right. You have a right to breath because air is abundant on our planet - there is no scarcity of it. Although your life is extremely scarce - there is only one of you - you do have a right to your life - to suggest otherwise is slavery.
You have a right to your property - to suggest otherwise is theft.
You have a right to freedom of expression and to believe what you wish - to suggest otherwise is tyranny.
However, people must pay for things like health care or food. Does a starving man have a right to enter a supermarket and eat whatever he wants? Health care providers have bills to pay and families to support, just as you do. If there is a "right" to health care, then you must have the ability to force health care providers to serve you.
Therefore health care is a privilege. Health care is a good and a service that everyone pays for.
Bottom line: if you are a healthy person, you can easily live, say, a month without health care. Can you live a month without groceries? A month without heat in the dead of winter? No. So, then, it logically follows that groceries and certain utilities are more important to keeping us alive than a health insurance plan. Should the gooberment buy our groceries and our gasoline, too?
The problem with the liberal argument for universal healthcare is that it doesn't take the argument far enough. String it out to its logical conclusion, and you won't find a shiny, happy people. You'll find tyranny.
Moi:
ReplyDeleteAs always, and specifically in this instance where you dicuss "rights" you're right!
Lovingly
M