Health Care

Any of you that know me know that I am not an expert on most things, and certainly not on health care. I also don't find a lot of fault with what Obama has been doing domestically (internationally he's a little too close to Carteresque naivete for me), notwithstanding the continual rants of partisan talk show hosts and right-wingnuts who reflexively aren't going to like anything he does. But the threatened government take-over of health care is a problem, and I have a few thoughts from the trenches:


The Learning Channel has some interesting programs. Among them are ones that deal with people with different physical maladies (dwarfism, weird and uncommon deformities, etc). For whatever reason, a very high proportion of them are from either Great Britain, New Zealand, or Australia. How do I know this? By the accents. Anyone who watches these programs regularly and pays attention can't help but notice that part of the misery of the people with these issues is the inordinate wait they must endure for treatment. For example, one of the common risks associated with many forms of dwarfism is potentially fatal brain aneurisms. In order to assess the risk to any specific patient, an MRI must apparently be performed. However, one cannot obtain an MRI until one's condition has been officially diagnosed. So the parents of these children are kept waiting for years while the child could die any minute from an aneurism.

What do all these places have in common? Government-run health care, or at least government involvement in health care to the extent that it dominates the system. What else do they have in common? They're all waiting to fly to the United States to see an expert or to be treated. These experts are always in the US -- never in Britain, never in France, never in Germany. Here we see the real-world implications of letting bureaucratic bean counters make life and death medical decisions. The contrast with those patients in the United States is striking -- never is the issue raised that the child is waiting for anything due to any cause other than geography. I'm sure money must be an issue sometimes, but it's never cited. Normally I'm skeptical of anecdotal evidence such as this, but when it comes from such a lefty operation as TLC, you'd expect a case to be made for government-run health care simply via programming, if there was a case. I'm pretty sure no one connected with the program understands what an indictment of government-run health care it is.


Which brings us to cost. If you go back to the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, which is when government meddling in all our lives took a quantum leap, you can trace the increase in health care costs directly to the passing of Medicare and similar government healthcare programs. Just as with $1000 toilets seats and $500 hammers, there is little sensitivity to cost on the part of the massive bureaucracy overseeing these programs. After all, they're spending other people's money -- those "other people" would be you, by the way. And once health care became sufficiently expensive due largely to cost insensitivity by this third party payor, everyone began to need health insurance. Now, unless you're destitute (or here illegally) and have nothing to lose, you must have health insurance lest some unforeseen medical problem leave you penniless.

So what is the proposed solution to the problem caused primarily by government meddling? Why, more government meddling, of course.

So let's look at the worst case scenario and assume this thing passes: do those pushing this not realize that, given all the things that are periodically rumored to have deliterious health effects (smoking, eating red meat, drinking iced tea, going in the sunshine, participating in sports, being alive), that it will not be long before the government is telling you what you can eat and do? "Mr Graham, you're over zee Government approved veight. You haf 90 days to bring your veight vivin Government Guidelinez or ve'll haf to vrefer zis to zee Veight Gestapo". I can just hear it now. Government-run health insurance is the avenue by which the Federal Government will invade every aspect of our lives.


And how is this system going to save money? One way is by capping doctors' salaries. Back to the TLC programs -- why is it that the world-renowned experts are always in the United States? Might it not be that the best and brightest of other countries either go into other fields or emigrate to the US where the opportunites are greater? This is socialism, pure and simple: rather than allow the free market set the value of various health care services, a necessary by-product being that medical care will be unequal as a function of economic status, reduce all care to some mediocre level so that it will be fair (albeit inferior) to everyone. Given that reducing cost is a primary goal and the thing is going to be run by the government, would this not be a good time to deny treatment to people here illegally? But noooooo. My understanding is that illegals will be welcomed along with those here legitimately.

Maybe, just maybe the health care system in the US, with all its warts, is as good as it gets. Again, I'm no expert, but I just have the feeling that many of those pushing this think we can have the benefits of government control over (theoretically reduced) costs without paying the price of long waits and diminished care. There's no free lunch. Where's Will Rogers when we need him.

So now Obama's poll numbers are plummeting, partially the normal descent from the initial orgasmic (largely brainless) euphoria over all he supposedly represents, but I'm sure also partially due to his pushing this boondoggle. He, of course, claims not to be concerned about it. Well now, ain't that interesting? When Bush's numbers plummeted and Bush said the same thing, Obama's reply was that Bush was out of touch with the American public and didn't care what they thought.

One of the pithier observations I've heard recently (and I can't recall who said it) was in response to Obama's comment that he wanted Obamacare to pay doctors on the quality of their work, not on the quantity; the comment was that it's a good thing for Obama that, in the recent Presidential election, the results were based upon the quantity of voters, not their quality. I love it.