Bringing Back Medical Leeches >>

For as long as the debate existed, the public has esteemed liberals to have a better grasp on healthcare and education in spite of their abysmal record where their visions have been implemented. Acting as though both are a product of a lack of federal funding and supervision, people seem to quickly forget that both industries are already practically ruled by DNC brainchildren through a regulatory spaghetti junction. Largely, this is due to the fact that they dare to talk about it much more than we do.

In what progressives call the “single payer system,” the only single payer is you. That is not what they would have you believe, but as they so arrogantly quip about their other crack-pot theories they know they cannot debate, “the debate is over.” Every other developed nation has socialized healthcare and the trendy liberals don’t want to be the odd man out at their next Massachusetts cocktail party. They have such a hard time explaining their nation’s faux pas to foreign dignitaries. Thank God we have them to represent us as and make us look cosmopolite!

I find it laughable to see that after Hurricane Katrina and the FEMA debacle, the insolvency of Medicare, the inevitable demise of Social Security, poor federal demographic planning, swollen deficits, and a slew of other obligations that democrats know they cannot afford but choose to buy votes with anyway, that anyone in their right mind would then contrive the idiotic notion to put the health of 300,000,000 Americans in the hands of the government. They can’t even properly run the DMV! Imagine the long lines, stiff government workers, paperwork, and nobody wanting to actually be there on a Saturday morning. Now imagine a federally-run hospital.

There are some serious constitutional quandaries with socialized healthcare, the growth of government, and the fact that the federal government has no place negotiating drug prices in a laissez-faire system intended by our founding fathers. But I am going to skip that aspect of it to point out the gross unfairness and inefficiencies in the single payer system.

That shining city on a hill has long served as our model. No, I am not talking about America or Jerusalem; I am talking about the ivory-lined utopia of Europe. Each day Liberals wake up, throw down their prayer rug, and pray in the direction of the Atlantic and chant some catechism of collectivist bliss. They never EVER bother to point out the failures of these systems. It is no secret that the average frog…Frenchman…French person…pays a stiff price on their take-home pay to fund their healthcare system. But despite that, their national insurance system stands at a huge deficit of around 13 billion annually. Furthermore, do French doctors have to pay massive insurance premiums to cope with John Edwards and his minions? Rolex roaches of his caliber chase ambulance vehicles with such a passion that he should just cave in and buy a trailer hitch. That fact alone impels us to examine the junk lawsuits that clog the courts of America as much as cholesterol packs our hospitals.

Actor David Foley and other Canadians can belittle the United States as much as they want on Bill Maher’s TV show, but the fact is that America stands peerless the world in medical research and development. In the past decade, a dozen Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans and the United States has dominated in drugs, procedures, and medical technology. And we do so because of the low costs of doing business in the United States. Many of the healthcare innovations that Europe provides its citizens are the byproduct of American innovation and competition-based universities, both a creative flame that government box-think tends to stifle. According to the Heritage Foundation, 60% of Canada’s radiological equipment is outdated! It is unfair to count America out of the international healthcare race when we fuel the world’s innovation. It’s a small wonder that European and Canadian dignitaries come to the United States for heart surgery, or that so many Canadian referrals end up here. Conversely, Canada has become a place one goes to die of rectal cancer.

Preventative measures seem a more insightful solution to this so-called “healthcare crisis.” We lead the world in obesity due our unparalleled prosperity, and that suggests we should solve that problem first. If we do, we may pleasantly learn that the need for healthcare is not as great as it once was, making the pill a little easier to swallow. Mike Huckabee lead this charge long before it became cool, and got the endorsement of Chuck Norris in the process. The deficit-running French healthcare system is not necessarily better per se, but rather it faces a smaller/shrinking population with less obesity and fewer trial lawyers. These are all challenges external to the healthcare bureaucracy, and should be diagnosed and treated as such, rather than an excuse to stretch government sutures.

The celerity of healthcare under socialism also takes a knock. Britain has 800,000 or so folks waiting for healthcare. Canada has an average of 17 weeks of wait time between a generalist’s referral and a specialist. There were even labor implications when, in 2004, Canadian healthcare workers went on strike due to thousands of procedural cancellations. In socialized medicine, doctor recruitment and retention are a great challenge since they are paid significantly less, amounting to a brain drain to freer markets. Tip to the wise…If you go to school for a decade to learn to help people and accrue thousands in debt in so doing, you deserve to ask for the highest bidding.

Hillary’s new plan was the same package as before. HillaryCare borderlines on fascistic, outrightly forcing Americans into her fold and subsidizing those who cannot afford it. The most fearful aspect of it is the sheer lack of choice and how little faith she puts in the average American to decide for themselves. Hillary does not believe in liberty, Hillary believes in Hillary. The flaws in her solution are all of the aforementioned to some degree, plus a soft indication of wage garnishments to force compliance. Healthcare costs in America contribute to about 15% of our GDP, and Hillary wants to essentially nationalize that sector from our entire economy in a sweep that would tantalize Hugo Chavez (this in addition to nationalizing the oil industry). Another criticism of her plan lies in that it is loaded with many unnecessary yet mandatory provisions (acupuncture, mandatory screenings, and infertility treatments) that jack up the costs of insurance and bring a mandatory benefit to chiropractors, acupuncturists, and insurance companies that now hold obligatory provisions justifying a hike in premiums. And if you cannot afford the premiums? The Fed passes the buck to the taxpayer, of course. Ultimately, special interest groups authored Hillary Care. So it perversely serves businesses that don’t have to earn their income, and it embraces European socialism in ironic tandem.    

The newer packaged excrement from the fist-bumping neophyte in the Oval Office, while contending to leave more choice room against the sunken HillaryCare leviathan, it is not much better. Established on the pillars of a lie, this proposal targets 47 million uninsured Americans, even though 10 million of them are illegals. Furthermore, 7.3 Million of the citizens in that figure earn north of $75,000 annually and may have opted out due to pre-existing conditions or age. So what are we at now… about 27 million uninsured? Half of that figure represents people in the overall economy moving in and out of employment and temporarily cancelling their insurance. Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure. Furthermore, Obama did not seem to mention the fines that would come with remaining uninsured (pretty much insuring that there is no other option for the poor), or how many jobs in the private sector this would obliterate. He does not account for how Medicare was initially sold under LBJ, projected to cost $500 million annually (that’s right, with an “m”), 10 billion by the 90s and yet is now over 400 billion a year. And all the while, Liberals sell their plans as the cost of a daily coffee. Will Obama’s flotilla of czars be able to ensure thin overhead the way they did with the stimulus?

What would be a more productive idea is to (instead of ramming a medical solution down the throats of Americans) give consumers a choice and live up to the title of “liberal”. What would be better than subsidy would be allowing poor and middle-class Americans to ACTUALLY KEEP THEIR MONEY TO PAY FOR THESE EXEPENSES. But wait…Bush already came up with that idea and he’s the fascist control-freak. Right? But let’s be real ladies and gentlemen. We cannot allow for the Left to tout that they are the only camp with a plan on this. We have ours, but we communicate it poorly. It goes as follows:

1. Tort Reform: Medical malpractice premiums are through the roof thanks to unscrupulous leisure-suit trial lawyers.
2. Tax Code Overhaul: FDR, in his prescient wisdom, decided to cap salaries during the Depression. Employers, still wanting to attract good talent, had to shift their incentives to non-monetary forms of compensation in the form of health insurance, and so recognition of employee medical programs became formalized into the tax code by the 1970s. Hence today, employers are wrongly expected to provide something they never had any expertise in providing. As a corollary, the Fair Tax would solve this issue… among many.
3. Obesity Prevention: Put PhysEd back in schools, make sports mandatory at some point or other through High School, and start serving carrots and lean beef with milk, in place of the pizza and soda that the cafeteria trough presently dishes out.
4. Catastrophic Insurance Only: Most people when insured are not incentivized to shop around like they do in the out-of-pocket systems worldwide, because as long as insurance is involved, medicine will not be treated like other products in the free market. People don’t often ask if an MRI is the cheapest offered when they are insured, and this causes insurance companies to raise their expectations that people will not price shop. Smaller expenses, broken arms, stitches, and scans, can all be covered with a tax free savings account…which incidentally the Fair Tax would not limit.
5. Erase Medical Care for Non-Citizens: If you illegally avoid income tax through cash-and-carry compensation, commit identity fraud, and swear allegiance to a foreign power, America cannot congest its hospitals with your sniffles.
6. Targeted Costing: Insurance policies should be tailored to a person’s lifestyle. Smoking, obesity, and promiscuity are all perfectly legal. Yet that said, their additional costs should not be spread over the rest of us. Some claim this is to be discriminatory, but I feel it should be allowed here and on airlines.
7. Interstate Insurance Sales: Free up the marketplace by allowing state-to-state competition, driving prices downward.
8. Medical Office Virtualization: I agree with Obama in this regard. Every now and then, a blind squirrel finds a nut. You can thank Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison for this, not the DNC.

Our measures, superior in confronting the sources of costs and respecting the limits of government praised by the original framers, produce more choice for the consumer by treating medicine like any other product. It cuts out the litigation, waste, IRS market warping, and holds the citizen perfectly accountable for any greasy diet and nicotine habits.

Obama is a lawyer, and ObamaCare is about larding up his ABA contributors, maybe even a few large federally knighted insurers poised for the final takeover, and it does little to address the aforementioned costs. But the Harvard faculty, who straddle endless harbors of the Great Unwashed like the Colossus of Rhodes, with mountainous thinkers like President Barack Obama to represent the planned, internationally tested, and failed socialist Rx -- they alone can plan from their bat caves the lives of millions of troglodytes lucky enough to bask in their saving grace. After all, Social Security, Medicare, Fannie Mae, Amtrak, and Detroit all attest to the proven record of the Democratic Party. So thank God that Sarah Palin is not in the Executive Branch, as she may not understand the novel  genius of industry nationalization, contributor payoff, nor the depth of imagination required to xerox a trillion bills onto a forklift. Yep. The helm for this task demands Ivy League for such tectonic advents, and is far beyond the peasant revolutionaries who rise to power by hook and crook to build banana republics. After all, economic upheavals have never been forcefully led by sweaty hicks with torches and pitchforks; this takes finesse.

I beseech you, life forms of the Republican and Libertarian galaxy, to talk about healthcare. We have better ideas, stronger arguments, a deeper respect for the timelessness of the Constitution, and a better Rx for America. >>