Health Care

I had started working on a health care mega-post, but I hadn't looked at it in a couple weeks, then got busy with more important things, like watching movies and eating Pop-Tarts. So I deleted what little I had completed. But here is as good of a framing of the issue as any I have read, and likely much better than anything I could do myself.

My concern is this: every last one of the shortcomings of our current health care system is the result of government meddling in the free markets, government regulation of hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, etc., and Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law. Excuse me if I am not enthusiastic about turning the tattered remains of 1/6 of the United States economy over to the very people who screwed it up, with some wild-eyed hope that they will fix it.

In the business world, it is a well-known axiom that the longer you delay a decision, the fewer options you will have until you have just one. And that one will almost always be the least attractive of the options you had at the beginning. That is where we are with health care. This problem has been building for a long time. We had a lot of options 30 years ago. We had fewer, but still several less-than-horrifying options 15 years ago. Now we seem to have only one, and I can't think of a worse alternative. Health care in the US will decline under socialized medicine, just as it has in England and Canada. And Mary Sal Wooten will still be sitting in her "decaying trailer somewhere on 301 South, with her retinas peeling like wallpaper from diabetic retinopathy, ankles swollen and darkening toward gangrene." Only instead of being turned away at the hospital because it isn't an emergency, she will be welcomed with open arms. Onto a two-year waiting list. The gangrene will kill her in 18 months. The doctors at the hospital will be well aware of this. It's called health care rationing. Now if Mary had the potential to make a significant contribution to society as, say, a business person, academic, or politician (especially that), she could get moved up the list far enough to survive until her treatment. Social Darwinism indeed. But she doesn't, so she won't, and it won't matter if she "really, truly no-shit can’t afford it" or not. She won't have any other option because for socialized medicine to have any chance of functioning, purchasing health care in the free market will be made illegal.

Of course, because I say that, I must be one of those rich Republican bastards with health care that Fred seems to be bitching at. (I make the minimum wage mandated by Arizona law, I've never voted for a Republican for any office, my parents were happily married when I was conceived, and I have health insurance through Debbie's job. I guess one out of four isn't bad for a pundit.)

(shrug)

When the bottom falls out, this will all be a quaint little tempest in a teacup anyway.