8/3/09

"Nobody is talking about government take-over of health care"

Think again. Obama and his allies are aiming for the destruction of private health insurance.

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3 comments:

  1. When the founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, Life was listed BEFORE Liberty. Unfortunately, in this country, many life-saving options are controlled by a for-profit industry that extends those options based on ones ability to pay.

    The bottom line for me is that >50% of household bankruptcies in this country can be tied to a medical event. Either illness that is not covered by insurance, or loss of income that then leads to loss of employment and insurance.

    The so-called Elites who run the for-profit insurance industry have created a system that requires middle-class Americans to mortgage their working lives to pay for their sicknesses. Effectively, making us debt-slaves to enjoy the inalienable right of Life.

    The lie is that we need this system to have better care. The lie is that bureaucrats will be making our healthcare decisions.

    The truth is, America is not in the upper rankings for things like infant mortality, overall life-span, and quality of medical care. If we need the for-profit system to enjoy the best care in the world, why has our quality been surpassed by so many other systems?

    The truth is, we already have bureaucrats making our healthcare decisions, they work for the for-profit health plans! Exchanging one bureaucrat for another is not the best option - but any option that puts health care decisions back into the hands of the treating physician and the patient is the best option. For-profit will not allow that to happen - ever - because you can't manage margins if you don't have spending authority.

    Stop reading the rhetoric, and ask your friends and family who live overseas what they think about their nationalized healthcare systems. I think you'll be surprised.

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  2. Rich, thanks for your well-thought out comment!

    I disagree with you fundamentally on one major point, and that is the nature of rights. The right to life is not a positive right, it is a negative right. A positive right places an obligation upon another, a negative right simply means that another cannot infringe on your personal sovereignty. To make the founders advocates of socialized medicine is to take their words out of their historical context and make the founders say the opposite of what they meant. Can you point to quotations by the founders where they articulated the right to life in the way that you have done? They talked about life, liberty and property. Do you apply the property issue the same way you do the life issue? Do I have a positive right to property if I'm unable to acquire it myself? No, they meant the opposite of that--that nobody has a claim on your property. Likewise, nobody has a claim on your life...that's all they meant by a right to life.

    As far as other countries go, if we want to model ourselves after them we would have to first ammend the Constitution to permit the federal government the powers over health care that were not granted to it.

    As far as our current health care system goes, the question should be how did it get so expensive to begin with? It wasn't a free market that produced this result, it was government intrusion in the 1960s to begin with and there-after. I'm not a fan of the current system, but socialism is immoral and impractical. And though our system isn't perfect, there's a reason why people come from Canada to get surgery in the U.S. Socialized medicine leads to dangerously long waiting times for appointments and treatmens as well as rationed care; it does not a communist paradise.

    Most importantly, as a Christian I am against using violence to redistribute property. Let's get Christians to be generous through persuasion, rather than stealing money at gunpoint from people in order to be generous with their money.

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  3. Richard,
    If you are to fully understand a government run healthcare system, you must first understand Economic Freedom. The entire basis of economic freedom is based on an extremely simple principle: "Everyone has a right to his or her life and property, and no one has the right to deprive anyone of those things."

    Now lets put that principle into practice. If you were to walk into your neighbors house and take his money at gunpoint, but promised to do wonderful and selfless things with the money, such as give it to charity and donate it to the poor, you would still be arrested promptly as a thief.

    I do not think you would disagree with that.

    So why do you think it is ok when government does that? Government takes our money forcibly through taxation and uses it to benefit someone else.

    By using your thinking, society has allowed government to operate by it's own set of moral rules.

    I agree 100% with you that we have the right to life. However government has no right to steal money (through taxation) to improve the life of someone else. All rights are stemmed through property rights. We have the right to our own body and we have the right to do anything we want to it, as long as it does not infringe the rights of others. We simply cannot violate the rights of others to create a government program, no matter how selfless and seemingly moral it appears to be.

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