Note: The following post is a quote:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2292831/posts
Universal Health Care Isn’t Worth Our Freedom
wall street journal ^ | JULY 15, 2009 | THOMAS SZASZ
Posted on July 14, 2009 9:00:10 PM PDT by Mount Athos
People who seek the services of auto mechanics want car repair, not “auto care.” Similarly, most people who seek the services of medical doctors want body repair, not “health care.”
We own our cars, are responsible for the cost of maintaining them, and decide what needs fixing based partly on balancing the seriousness of the problem against the expense of repairing it. Our health-care system rests on the principle that, although we own our bodies, the community or state ought to be responsible for paying the cost of repairing them. This is for the ostensibly noble purpose of redistributing the potentially ruinous expense of the medical care of unfortunate individuals.
But what is health care? The concept of reimbursable health-care service rests on the premise that the medical problem in need of servicing is the result of involuntary, unwanted happenings, not the result of voluntary, goal-directed behavior. Leukemia, lupus, prostate cancer, and many infectious diseases are unwanted happenings. Are we going to count obesity and smoking as the same kinds of diseases?
If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price. We will become the voluntary slaves of a “compassionate” government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone.
Henry David Thoreau famously remarked, “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Blog:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/07/singlepayer_health_care_in_act.html
July 15, 2009
“Single-payer health care in action”
Russ Vaughn
SNIPPET: “I’m no big fan of the Associated Press as I consider them soapbox hawkers for world socialism in general, and more specifically, anything anti-American that will support that goal. However, as the overused cliché goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Such is the case with Mary Clare Jalonick’s article describing the terrible conditions faced by Native Americans in their single-payer, federal health care system.
What resonates here for me is my past experience in dealing with that system as a government sales manager for a subsidiary of one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies. I was a hands-on manager who wanted to see my accounts, to better know what their needs were, so I travelled to a number of Indian Health Service facilities, from remote clinics in Alaska to their so-called showcase inpatient facilities in Phoenix and Gallup, as well as their national headquarters in suburban Rockville, Maryland outside Washington.
It was all uniformly, bureaucratically, depressing. Inadequate doesn’t begin to describe the services offered and criminal doesn’t begin to describe the results.”