Lawrence said...
As a Republican I'm not against what most people want Obama’s health care program to do, which is to give more people and especially poor people access to quality health care. But from an efficacy and practicality point of view and everything I view about it predicts failure.
We have a real problem with not enough medical resources and personnel to care for our needs. But Obama's program doesn't increase the medical care resources available, it just makes limited resources more accessible. (The government can force people to buy insurance but they can't force people to become doctors.)
In this the program attacks the wrong problem. We don't need more insurance to afford medical care. We need affordable medical care that doesn't require more insurance. We also need more medical care resources. This program doesn't make actual medical care cheaper, it doesn't increase available medical resources, and it doesn't increase incentive for more people to become doctors. The only thing this program does is give the government more control over telling doctors how to practice medicine, which is a significant disincentive to being a doctor.
The other medical problem is it doesn't help pharmaceutical companies generate the cash needed for researching new medical discoveries. The less money a drug company makes the less money goes into research. Since U.S. drug companies do 90% of the medical research globally, we end up footing the bill through higher drug costs. So, where will the money come from for new medical discoveries? Taxes? Government controlled insurance isn't going to support drug company profit margins. In this case, all we have done is shift the cost of drug research from private industry's pocket to the public tax payer's pocket.
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When it comes to limited medical resources being applied to a significantly increased patient list, who decides the priorities of treatment among those patients? This program takes that decision out of the hands of doctors and patients, and parents, and puts it in the hands of government bureaucrats. And at this point the government can't magically make more medical resource in the same way they can magically print more money, the only real control government has at this point is to ration existing resources.
Tragically, as I noted before, the real problem we have in context of limited medical resources isn't addressed by this program. What it does provide incentive for is expanding lower quality medical care from a less trained and less skilled medical community who currently function at the cheaper end of the medical profession. And this lower end of the profession can't deal with the more exotic problems faced by many people who need true medical specialists and specialized care.
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From a constitutional perspective this is one more step toward governmental tyranny. Our founding fathers fought a revolution against this very type of government control over society, and now we as a nation have effectively given a measure of that tyrannical control back to our government. From a federalist perspective this is a very dark thing for the gummint to force a system that takes away our rights to choose our own medical care, and dictates to doctors how we practice medicine.
Consider that the current medical insurance industry has to operate according to strict government rules. The government says the companies are failing, and the government is now taking over control of the insurance. So, if private industry can't be successful in following the government's rules, what makes us think that the government can be any more successful under its own rules?
We are placing an awful lot of faith in our government bureaucrats and politicians to be successful at something we are accusing our medical professionals and private business professionals of failing at.
3/24/2010 2:00 PM
http://metalutheran.blogspot.com/2010/03/annnnd.html?showComment=1269453650189#c4870923316834285903
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