Socialized Health Care in the USA

[kandrathe]

It seems to me the current system is already radically American (or, perhaps more accurately, USian), and it's not working. It's not containing costs, it's not providing effective health care per dollar, it's not encouraging preventive health care, it spends too much on the old at the expense of the young, it leaves many people uninsured or underinsured, etc etc -- all the things already mentioned. About the only thing more radically American one could do is to cut out Medicare and Medicaid altogether (and social security while one is at it).

Which really speaks to the need for analyzing the problems to determine root causes, and then implementing a resolution. Destroying the health insurance industry, and rationing health care will not address the problems of supply and demand.

Now I understand you're coming at this from a definite "small-government view" in which it seems like the military is about the only necessary government institution (though one might ask why that should be excepted if everything else is better off without government interferences -- after all, the US already went part way in Iraq to privatizing military functions, and the CIA considered outsourcing terrorist assassinations to Blackwater;)).

I seem to recall that the Brits had mercenaries to kill off their revolutionary brothers. Outsourcing military functions is a pretty age old tradition. In the scheme of plan, do, study, act, many times the government should have a role in planning, and studying, but either by fiat, or tradition, or growth over time they end up implementing functions that may better be done by the private sector.

Such as, the postal service. Thank you Ben Franklin, but the USPS is lower quality, more expensive, and bankrupt. The fundamental concept that I object to is where the government, through force, takes away peoples property to then distributes it according to their redistribution rules.

But in my view access to adequate health care is a basic thing that every member of a society should have, just as every child, however poor their family, should have the opportunity to acquire an education. And I don't see how those goals can be met without strong public and government support and a willingness on the part of people to pay for them.

I understand that it is hard to let go, and allow things to flow within the private sector. It is much easier to use the power of law to force the changes you determine will help. So, there used to be this perceived problem that older people weren't getting adequate health care, so they implemented by fiat, Medicare. Same with poor people and Medicaid. These are like dams in the free flow of supply and demand, now 50% of other peoples health care costs are being shouldered by the same workers who then have to insure and provide for their own health care. As it is with SSI, now we have the baby boom where their are more people consuming the service than there are people to provide it, or pay for it. It's a monumental pyramid scheme that set to crash, and the politicians are only doing "feel good" fixes to slide by for another four years. We've been watching this bus approach for 20 years, so the fact that its here now is no surprise.