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Posted on 09/04/2007 4:44:13 PM PDT by Orwells Ghost
This is where things are heading. From the AP: “John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.” Edwards: “It requires that everybody get preventive care... you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked...” He noted that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of a problem.” Edwards: "The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death.”
In NYC, already, there has been, for over a year, mandatory reporting to the government by law of diabetics' blood sugar test results so that people with diabetes can be visited by government health police and strong-armed to do this or that in terms of conventional therapies or interventions (as determined and sanctioned by the government)...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
This post is apropos of your namesake.
Your FReeper handle is so very appropriate for this article.
Great minds. . .
Hillary.
Your screenname couldn’t be more apt, Mr. Orwell. And this is exactly why we need healthcare to remain market-based and incentive-based.
We won’t even begin to approach the price controls that will begin encroaching upon the system and how this will stifle pharmacological innovation...
Edwards is, of course, full of hot air, anyway. I hardly see how he’s going to force poor blacks (who are notorious for not seeking medical care until an ache becomes a disability) to go to the doctor.
No Controlling Legal Authority?
Welcome to Free Republic
I saw a bon mot today that “Foreign aid is where the poor of a rich nation are forced to transfer funds to the rich of a poor nation.” Now we will have a situation under Edwards type of thinking where the elites, who will most often be able to opt out of government health care and pay for immediate and superior service, will dictate actual physical interventions required by government on the poor to contain costs. Always the poor being ordered about by the rich using the poor’s own tax dollars, in part, to pay for the benefit that gives the government the “right” to order the poor person about. And by “poor” I mean people that can’t afford to pay for a major medical bill (likely you, me, and most every other reader here that does not have several million liquid dollars they can devote to medical care).
Your screenname couldn’t be more apt, Mr. Orwell. And this is exactly why we need healthcare to remain become market-based and incentive-based. There, fixed it for you. The problem with health care NOW (that they want to "fix" with government intervention) STARTED when third parties got involved and started to pay for (the government) and control the supply of (insurance companies, may they rot in hell) health care. What needs to happen is for people to pay for health care out of their own pocket again, period.
You do make some good points. But as a twenty-something still in school, I have to ask what the heck is going to happen to me if I’m in an accident that leaves me with an enormous hospital bill... I have no source of income—at least not one big enough to begin paying hospital bills.
While I wouldn’t be opposed to taking it on as debt, I think there is a place for insurance, and I think it’s needed in some instances. It would be especially appropritae for students, for instance.
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Most people can't afford to pay a 20, 60, or 100,000 dollar hospital bill. People today can't even afford prescriptions. A very small minority of Americans would agree to 100% out of pocket. Those days are gone. No candidate will ever win with that on his platform.
Just as important: who is in charge of your Electronic Medical Records (EMR), records that will become like so many other sources of information about citizens that will gradually fall to court orders despite “strong laws”, as have electronic toll records and cell phone location records.
The difference between your medical records being on paper files and the same records being in a database is ease of access. Few bureaucrats can troll through millions of paper files, especially when they are dispersed at many locations. When these records reside on just a few large databases, bureaucrats will find them irresistible.
We already see hints of the future under EMR. A few weeks ago there was a story about a school district that intended on sending demands that parents put children who had a high Body Mass Index on a diet at home. How did they know? Through the limited EMR system the school kept on student health. The next step will be that if a parent declines to give the school’s demands any attention, that the parents will be threatened with “endangering the health of the child”. This has been a practice over the past several years when parents decline to give drugs to their young boys for being restless in class.
The only way to prevent such tyranny is to deny government (and government schools) the tools and the data in the first place. People have very little to gain by EMR but the people who want to control our lives and impose enforcement of their rules do.
There. Fixed it to read as it should read. The leadership of the Dem party is over run with leftist (those who are not quite communist or fascist, but fit into that genre). The Dem elite want to rule by committee where these elites are the commissars.
here's a hint... it ain't you!!!
Oh, I forgot, the IRS will do it.
Guess having them go everywhere else is okey-dokey.
And, dont forget:
Edwards is merely a little ahead of the curve here. It is inevitable that the one that pays the fiddler gets to call the tune.
This must be fought and vigorously. But some days I cannot but be depressed about the inexorable march to collectivism.
The tipping point has passed, that now more than half of the people pay no tax yet they can still vote on the taxes of others.
Once we thought taxation without representation was bad, but representation without taxation may be worse.
You are dead on.
Just as medical care needs to be market based in order to provide all of us the highest and best level of care in the world, so does the option to hire a third party to help protect us against the kinds of situations you outlined.
I don’t know how to prevent the insurance companies involvement from causing medical rate to increase, but a method needs to be found.
Insurance does cause rates to increase, witness the increase of simple veterinary procedures once pet insurance became more standard.
And who’s been pushing for these Electronic Medical Records recently? None other than George W. Bush.
I think health insurance rates should be based on a mechanism similar to the one that sets auto insurance rates.
Individuals who engage in behavior that increases risk should bear the cost of that risk.
John Edwards is the personification of the most dire sociological and political warnings of philosophers and humanists of the last 300 years.
But he's got company.
There Hillary...
I assume you mean like the AIDS brigade.
Or the "beached whales" contingent?
A non profit insurer could probably provide catastrophic coveragefor $100-200 per month. Your statement, while true, demonstrates why most people are unqualified to vote. They have no right to vote on what to do with your money or mine.
Edwards comments sounds like scrappleface!
I was envisioning catastrophic insurance (say $5K or $10K deductible) for $100-$200 per month for severe accidents, cancer, etc. Modeled on an HSA, in other words.
Well said.
Brave New World. They will be telling us what medications to take, and will make sure that we take them. For our own good. Then they will give us behavior modification medications, for our own good. Only the elite will be exempt.
Higher taxes and broadened eligibility mean fewer citizens taking care of the function themselves, and increased moral risk. This death spiral (a death spiral of economic and personal liberty) ends with government being called upon to “bail out” a “failed system”. Now the conversion to the Dark Side is complete. What used to be a private economic function has been artfully morphed into a way for politicians to gain votes and control large budgets.
The upcoming presidential election will determine the future of medical care: we are not even debating if it is an appropriate government function. The only debate is whether it will be single payor (government monopoly: a guaranteed disaster) or some scheme of private insurance.
If the latter, unless we fix all the other problems (such as allowing price collusion by insurance carriers via their “reasonable and customary” schedule), and unless we end the custom of employers providing health insurance, we will just muddle along without the real economic incentives necessary to improve the system.
In Hillary’s healthcare speech she cites a mother of a child who was having difficulty pay the medical bills for her young son’s FOUR open-heart surgeries.
An honest response from Hillary would have been:
Mam, under my plan you wouldn’t have those bills.
Under my plan your son would have died, while waiting 15 MONTHS for the first surgery!
Not specifically, but members of those groups are certainly examples of individuals whose behavior increases their health risks.
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Oh, so instead of being the Health Czar, you're the Insurance Czar. Here's an idea: if some people want to write medical insurance, and other people want to buy it from them at a price they can agree on, you butt out. That way you avoid being the flip side of John Edwards.