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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:
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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.