Posted on 06/10/2009 2:14:16 AM PDT by Scanian
Fresh from grabbing much of the U.S. auto and banking industries, the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats are moving briskly toward nationalized health care.
In a letter to Senate Democrat leaders, President Obama has called for forcing all Americans to have health insurance, employers to offer insurance plans or pay a fine, and to create a government alternative insurance plan.
Any or all of these will lead to a government takeover of the health care industry. And that will result in rationed care, in which cost-conscious bureaucrats will decide who is worth treating. Should your grandmother get a hip replacement? Go down the hall to the queue outside Office 37-B and fill out more forms. We'll let you know in a few months. Hey, you with the brain tumor. Get back in line.
Private health insurance, we are told, will still be offered. But the playing field will tip severely with the government's enormous competitive advantages. Businesses and individuals will be tempted to abandon private care and take a ride on the government's ambulance. When enough of them do so, the private system will collapse, and the government will take over with a single-payer system.
After First Lady Hillary Clinton failed to commandeer the health-care industry in the mid-‘90s, "progressives" have discussed doing it gradually. A centralized system would give the government the power of life and death over America's families. Just the threat of withholding medical care is enough for most people to surrender other freedoms. Such a system also reinforces the idea that government is God.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Well, it won't disappear. It will still be there to serve those who can pay more for enhanced services. It will certainly be much, much smaller, though.
Individuals will eventually be banned from private contracting with physicians, subject to criminal penalties for both parties.
Scotus will find this outrage constitutional.
“The Beast reminded us early on that we must “Get over the cult of the individual.””
“Give me liberty or give me death.” I would die to preserve the right of my child and all of us to live as individuals. Funny that as big a narcissist as Hillary would say this. Actually, what we need is to “Get over the cult of the ‘intellectual’”. Hillary is no more ‘intellectual’ than the ground squirrels in my yard, but it is her belief and that of of her fellow travelers that they possess ‘special’ knowledge. Historically, whenever people like that wind up in power it doesn’t go well.
Except for the members of the oligarchy. They will be entitled to the best medical care taxpayers can provide, with a personal physician on call. The rest of us must suffer reduced care and freedom for the good of the collective.
For us peons, I suspect that your voting record will also be a factor in determining whether you get health care or not. Obama has already played that card in choosing whcih car dealers get to stay in business.
I must state (without having read it in it's entire form) that gummint has been abrogating it's responsibility to "ration healthcare" for decades. Once Medicare forced the medical community to accept the dictum that "healthcare is a Right" (capital "R") the path was irrevocably drawn. Read Leonard Pliekoff from the late 80's. Having stated "healthcare is a Right" the gummint was in an awkward position when renal dialysis was introduced in the late 70's early 80's. The position of Congress was that "since healthcare is a Right" it is unethical to let folks suffer from the withholding of lifesaving care simply because they couldn't afford it. That has been policy ever since and since Congress and society at large didn't have the courage to discuss what the ultimate ramifications of this kind of thinking would be we have seen the can kicked down the road until the failed logic of this kind of thinking is destroying us.
Cultures can survive only so long as the "truths" they tell each other are "true" and I would suspect an anthropologist would tell you that this is the fact behind the death of every prior culture. Our culture seems to be coming to a Nexus of logical contradictions that won't allow us to proceed until we deal with what is true and what isn't. If we succeed we will continue. If we don't we won't. Prospects aren't good IMHO.
I predict a bigtime “black market” or “underground market” will emerge from this diliberate chaos in the area of medical care.
Plus history shows that the little people end up rising up to get rid of those in power.
In a free enterprise economy, it's consumer dollars that are the rationing mechanism. It turns out that there's no better rationing system.
What Obama wants to do is take the rationing out of the hands of consumers and put it in the hands of the government.
So, calling it "rationing" is a misnomer. The correct term is "government rationing".
We need a soundbite to counter “free healthcare” or “universal healthcare,” and “rationed healthcare” is it.
We can all rest assured that anything that Obama does in nationalizing health care will not affect the healthcare plan that members of Congress enjoy.
No doctor will risk over a decade of hard work to lose his/her license over illegal treatment. They must interface with other health care professionals and will be unable to work for long under the government radar. The statists and popular culture will enjoy show trials of such counterrevolutionary doctors, enemies of the people.
I understand your point, and you're right, but it's dangerous to compare the two approaches using the same term, since the analogy isn't exact. Under a government-controlled healthcare system, the amount of available care is fixed, whereas in a market-based healthcare system, the amount of available healthcare is open-ended.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.