Get the government out of healthcare. People should be paying out of pocket for routine and general care. They can easily afford catastrophic insurance if they want to.
"You do realize you're on a conservative Forum, don't you?
Get the government out of healthcare. People should be paying out of pocket for routine and general care. They can easily afford catastrophic insurance if they want to."
No, really?
FreeRepublic is a conservative forum?
Who knew?
Ronald Reagan held Social Security sacrosanct (and was a key union leader pressing FDRs agenda back in the day). Reagan did not like LBJs War on Poverty and the 1960s radicalism of the Democratic Party, so he left it, but Reagan never abandoned the concept of Social Security.
Was he not a conservative?
Newt Gingrich, in one of his first public speeches after becoming speaker, praised FDR and social security. Is Gingrich not a conservative?
George W. Bush, the current President, pressed through the expansion of Medicare to provide prescription drugs. He did this through a House dominated by Republicans, and a Senate in which Republicans have had either a majority or a filibusterable minority throughout his entire term.
Is the President not a conservative?
Health care, like Social Security and Public Schools and roads and sewers is a fundamental and universal need. The private sector has a role to play in medicine, retirements, education, road-building and sewers, of course, but the needs for all of these things are universal. This is not an ideological debating point. It is a self-evident fact of human existence. Before Social Security, old people literally starved, or were dependents on their children, who often could not support them. Public roads (and canals, and railroads) opened the country to settlement and commerce. Public education, including public funding of college education through the GI Bill, made America more upwardly mobile than it ever was before. And no responsible conservative leader (as in Presidents, Speakers of the House, etc.) has attempted to dismantle those basic infrastructural necessities.
Yes, it is a conservative forum, and I am one of those realistic people who deals in the real world of real policies with real democratic limits on the possible. Some conservatives may want to live in an Ayn Randian dystopia, but that is not me. We are always going to have the government providing the final financial backstop of health care. That is a given which democracy is not going to let come unravelled, nor SHOULD it, because the alternatives are what we had before, which was lots of people dying young for lack of care. We are never going to go back to that.
Given the unalterable reality, and good, of government involvement in medicine, a thinking conservative leader needs to think in terms of making it economic and rational. Runaway tort and the current runaway costs are neither economically sustainable nor rational. That does not mean that we are going to dump the government safety net. Put it out of your mind. That will NEVER happen, because 85% of the people will vote against it every time, including most thinking conservatives. We aren't going to push grandma out on an ice floe because she can't pay for her meds. We're going to provide the safety net by government. Accept that bound of reality, because it IS reality, even in a conservative forum - ask Reagan, ask Gingrich, ask Bush. If you're going to throq THEM off the bus too, then you want to rave in lala-land. Which is your right.
Policymakers have to deal with the reality of government health care insurance, and figure out how to make it more efficient. "Kill it" is never going to be the answer. Forget it.