I received the survey yesterday and tore it open in the post office. I scanned down to see if it was a plea for money. It didn’t make it to my car. I deplore this marketing/fundraising technique and I doubt that anybody reads the survey responses. I think they open the envelope, subtract the check and trash the rest.
On reading the questions, they selected every conservative hot-button issue except national security. This is shameful exploitation of their electorate.
I think our number one issue should be term limits. Career employees have too much invested in their employer. If you’re a hammer, you tend to see the whole world as nails. If you’re a career government employee you tend to see every solution as bigger government; regardless of party. What this “survey” tells me is that the Republican party is willing to exploit our concerns and, as the author pointed out, they have repeatedly failed to act on them when they could have.
I attended the 912 protest in DC (at a cost of about $600.) I’m attending local political events searching for a candidate I can work for and give financial support to. Several of my friends are doing the same. I think a third party will only ensure we have more Democrats in office. So, how do we actually take control of the Republican party and re-center it (assuming it was once centered) on core philosophical values?
Another thing I think we should concentrate on is “health care.” By that I mean something entirely different than what everyone else means. The “insurance” most of us have through our employer is government mandated private socialized medicine. Socialized anything increases the price and builds in market-bending new realities. There are two areas where the cost of medicine have dropped yearly since their introduction. Lasik surgery and plastic surgery. How is it possible that the cost of these services has declined? Increased efficiency due to competition. Why is it happening for these two and nothing else in medicine? Because Lasik surgery and plastic surgery are not covered by “health insurance.” The reason that health care has gone out of sight is not that there are uninsured people. It is because some people ARE insured.
The second problem is that government has decreed that no one can be declined treatment because they can’t pay for it. Despite the “freeness” of their treatment, somebody does pay. You and me and every taxpayer and insurance provider. That “free” service is spread unequally across everybody who does pay. Before the government got involved doctors and hospitals were expected to donate some time and materials to indigent cases. There were charity hospitals. I don’t know by what mechanism these charity hospitals were removed from the medical scene, but they seem to be long gone.
Would I advocate that we turn away the illegal alien who fell off a roof and broke his leg? No. But nothing says we have to pay to treat his diabetes or lung cancer he got from smoking two packs a day. That should be the job of charity hospitals. It should be illegal and immoral to force somebody, even an anonymous taxpayer, to pay for the medical care of whole classes of people they don’t even know. And, further, if those people are here illegally, they should be firmly shown the door.
But, back to the issue of the survey, shame on you Republican leadership.
‘Another thing I think we should concentrate on is “health care.” By that I mean something entirely different than what everyone else means. The “insurance” most of us have through our employer is government mandated private socialized medicine. Socialized anything increases the price and builds in market-bending new realities. There are two areas where the cost of medicine have dropped yearly since their introduction. Lasik surgery and plastic surgery. How is it possible that the cost of these services has declined? Increased efficiency due to competition. Why is it happening for these two and nothing else in medicine? Because Lasik surgery and plastic surgery are not covered by “health insurance.” The reason that health care has gone out of sight is not that there are uninsured people. It is because some people ARE insured.’
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You are quite correct. Whether “private” (with massive legislatively mandated coverage terms) or “public”, comprehensive medical services insurace is a driver of costs, not a controller of costs. Medicare and Medicaid shift costs to private plans and individuals by strong arming the providers with mandated low fee schedules, and the larger private plans do the same through contract negotiations with their “in network” providers, and sharply limited benefits for subscribers who use “out of network” providers. After these two levels of “cost shifting” to smaller employer plans and individuals with negligible negotiating power, the cost shifts back “up to the top” (i.e., to taxpayers) when indigent individuals jam emergency rooms consuming huge amount of resources with zero cost to them (though their treatment in the ER’s is substandard by any reasonable standard - - “stabilize the patient, and then kick them out in the street” or if they can’t get away with that, then “move them to the ‘meat locker’ in-patient services until they croak”, several tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars later).
A largely third-party-payer funding system will do this every time because of the disconnect between cost to provide the service and the direct cost incurred by the user. Until this pernicious cost-shifting “food chain” is terminated (first step - eliminate the employer tax deduction for employer-sponsored medical services benefits), the cost spiral will continue, absent a severe and equally pernicious rationing scheme such as is on display in the British system.
There is a place for medical insurance, but it should be limited to catastrophic coverage, e.g., an extremely high deductible, and routine services should be provided the same way groceries and household goods are provided, through direct purchase by users, who will drive the prices back to a reasonable level. Tort reform would help too, but it’s not only the availability of “deep pockets” of insurers and medical service providers that is a problem, but the lack of serious sanctions against serially negligent and reckless medical service providers. If their professional associations won’t apply appropriate discipline, the legal system, with all its limitations, will have to do the job.