Brace Yourself for Health Care “Reform”

Senate unveils health-care bill
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/18/AR2009111802014.html?wpisrc=newsletter
I don’t believe there is one Democrat who really believes the cost estimates for these bills, or that they will really cut Medicare and tick off elderly voters, or that they can really pay for them by cutting waste and fraud. When does the government ever do that? When does a government program ever cost what the politicians say it will? Medicare? Social Security? Defense projects? The fact is, if it gets them re-elected in 2010 and 2012 for “reform” healthcare and giving healthcare to all as a “right,” they don’t care if the country collapses in 2020 or 2024 in fiscal ruin, as the Soviets did in 1989.

So they will ruin the best healthcare system in the world. Americans live longer than anyone else, after you take out homicides and car accidents, about which these bills do nothing. We’d live even longer but for smoking, obesity, drugs and risky sex, about which these bills do nothing. We have the best cancer survival rates for most cancers in the developed world, and lack the long waiting lists of most government health plans. The best universal health plan in the world is Switzerland, but the Democrats ignored that example, because it’s all private insurance, not government run bureaucracy, no Medicare, no large government employee unions to vote for the big-government party.

Our system is expensive, yes, partly because the rest of the world feeds off the innovation in techniques, technology and pharmaceuticals we pay for. Much of that innovation, lacking the financial incentives, will go away. So the government will have to fund more research, which will be decided on a political basis rather than a need basis. We already spend six times as much on breast cancer research per death as on lung cancer research per death, because breast cancer is a political disease, like AIDS. Lung cancer and prostate cancer, non-political diseases, get less research funding. Once this passes, all major healthcare decisions will be politically driven, not patient/market driven. And own the road, tens of thousands of Americans will die, who might have lived longer, and will die not knowing this vote killed them

They say they want competition, but won’t let the insurance companies compete across state lines. They won’t let insurance companies compete on what they cover—they have to follow the political mandates. They won’t do anything about tort reform, the only real reform that lowers costs, because the Democrat leadership is all lawyers. In all those European countries they so admire, lawyers are paid by the hour, not a percentage of winning big cases, and they don’t have billionaire lawyers. And in many, the loser pays the costs, keeping down the filing of “lottery lawsuits.”

So, America, you’re going to get healthcare reform, and you’re going to get it god and hard. When I was a kid, I remember the doctor coming to our house to see my grandmother, with his black bag. Our children will find our open access to healthcare, short waiting lists and access to advanced drugs and technology just as quaint in twenty years.

I predict this bill will increase the cost of healthcare, will decrease the doctor to patient ratio (look at Canada) and will decrease innovation in healthcare, all of which will result in increased suffering and death for Americans.

In a post last week, I mentioned meeting a doctor who escaped, at risk of his life, from the Soviet Union in 1977. He said he fled the evils of socialism and central planning, and now they were following him here. He asked where he could flee to escape the coming tyranny in America? I had no answer.

He also taught me a new phrase, for use in such situations. I can’t spell it, but it’s pronounced, “Tub toy-you mutt.” You can use it with the politicians who are ruining our country. It will tell them what they can do with their mothers. They’ll appreciate it being in Russian, the home language of socialism and government planning.