Mar 24 2010
Personal, Politics, Society

Thoughts on Healthcare

These are just some of my random thoughts about the current healthcare stink. I make no guarantees of accuracy or even sound judgment.

Is healthcare a right?

The rights in the constitution are things that do not impose on another person’s rights, and these are rights to action, not property or some sort of service. The right to free speech, to bear arms, to assemble… to do things. Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness. These are not rights to have things that must be provided but the right to do things.

Government provided healthcare, by definition, has to be provided at someone else’s cost and with someone else’s expertise and equipment. The fact that these services are provided by someone else makes them a privilege, not a right.

OK… not a right. But as a nation can we decide to provide this as a public service? A benefit of paying taxes?

Sure. We, as citizens, can decide to offer these services.

But, isn’t that socialism?
Yes.

OK… but is socialism so bad? We offer other public services too. Are all public services, like Police, Fire, Libraries, Streets, Water/Sewer socialism?

Not really. True… these are programs agreed upon by the population as services to be provided at taxpayer cost, but they are civic services put in place at a local level. Socialism is a system of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy. These civic services work best at a local level. They are limited in size, and this keeps waste and bureaucracy limited in scope.

So, if nationalized healthcare is not a right, but a social program, the question becomes… is it a good idea?

We can only look at examples from other countries that are already offering nationalized healthcare.

These programs are going bankrupt or in serious financial trouble everywhere they have been established, and the tax rates in some of those countries are topping out at around 60% if you add the upper income tax rate and other taxes, like property taxes and the VAT tax, which so popular in Europe. Depending on how much money you make, that’s OVER HALF of your paycheck to the government. Wow.

The law that was passed last week will drive our national debt to over 90% of our governmental budget by 2020. Ninety percent of government spending will go to debt. Let me say that again… NINETY PERCENT.

The long and short is that, while this may be a compassionate and nice thing, our country simply cannot afford it. These programs actually cost money. This is not “free healthcare” by any stretch.

Also, by most accounts the actual medical service suffers from the same waste and inefficiencies as other public services. Long wait times to see a doctor or to have a medical procedure performed (years in some cases). The quality of the care starts to suffer from the bloated system. Case in point… the Prime Minister of Canada recently had heart surgery in Miami, Florida because he could not get the procedure under the nationalized Canadian system… The Prime Minister! There are countless stories of Canadians heading south of the border and paying for treatment that they cannot get in Canada.

My conclusion

I’d rather reform a free market system to provide safeguards for people who need help than begin down a road to public system. The devil in the current system is the mega insurance company. The devil in the other scenario is the government. You can’t find another provider if the government doesn’t do its job. You just live with it… or die with it.

Mar 21 2010
Politics, Society

The Keepers and The Kept

Alexis de Tocqueville once postulated that despotism could only take seed in American democracy through a kind of soft tyranny. He said that this tyranny would “degrade men without tormenting them.” He spoke of something that did not yet exist in his world. It was the idea of this tyrant appearing not as an oppressor, but rather a “guardian.” The day that Tocqueville envisioned so long ago may be closer than we think here in America.

Today congress will vote (loosely termed if you account for all of the parliamentary gymnastics that has been going on in the past months) on a “Healthcare Reform” bill. This bill could set the wheels in motion for the growth of a permanent nanny state in America. The details of the bill are largely a mystery at this point. Nancy Pelosi said that we’d need to vote for it in order to find out what’s in it. It is so convoluted and lengthy that I can imagine that not one member of congress has fully read or understood this bill, much less the implications of it becoming law.

Every indication is that this bill will 1) eventually force private health insurance out of business from government competition that is subsidized by taxpayer money, 2) create a government bureaucracy to dictate the level of care that each person receives, 3) ration access to health care due to the limited supply of doctors and increased demand of patients, 4) drive this country into bankruptcy.

Sounds like good plan to me.

This is obviously a very polarizing issue, and support is divided today at about 48% opposing and 38% supporting, depending on your polling source.

At the core of this conflict is a differing worldview. While too complicated to fully explore now, I’ll try to explore the basic idea in future posts.

Basically, the leftist Washington elite have a small window of opportunity to make sweeping changes in our laws, and they have decided that they are the ones to make life decisions for the poor, unwashed masses. The plain folk that inhabit ‘flyover country’ need someone to watch out for them because of their basic ignorance and inability to navigate their own health care options.

Because of the tremendous need for clear thinking, these Washington intellectuals will become the Keepers and ‘we the people’ will become The Kept.

We are now experiencing a small realization of the left’s humanistic priesthood coming to power in America. I hope that this can be reversed in the Fall.

The root cause here goes back thousands of years. In future posts we’ll explore modern-day Nicolaitans of American secular culture.

Mar 03 2010
Brewing, Video

Beer Activist

I think I’m going beyond beer snobbery to beer activism. What a strange thing to take so seriously… but this is becoming a passion of mine.

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