Jailing doctors will inevitably lead to slavery. What happens when doctors abandon the profession because of government-controlled wages and the risk of fines or prison? Will the government force doctors to practice?
As that great constitutional scholar Kanye West pointed out, the thirteenth amendment allows the government to force doctors into "involuntary servitude" if the government can find a crime to convict a doctor of. Unauthorized treatment of patients might be one such crime, given the clash between government edict and the Hippocratic Oath. Instead of "death panels" we will have "star chambers" to find and convict doctors in order to press them into single-payer service.
-PJ
This was what the House GOP said they wanted in the last Congress:
“Reduce costs, reduce taxes, take away the “individual mandate,” but still ensure people that want healthcare have the ability to purchase it”
The whole problem, succinctly stated, in one clever, incoherent sentence.
The reason the Republicans can’t crack this nut, in fact, the reason their party won’t exist as a single party by 2024, is that they are divided and unable to be reconciled over the contradiction so ably stated above.
“Ensure people that want healthcare have the ability to purchase it”
Let’s break it down.
Nobody “wants” “healthcare” (whatever that is). I suppose the author of the sentence means “health insurance”.
People either need health care (meaning, hospitalization, surgery, medications, doctor visits, Xrays, MRIs, and nursing services), or they don’t. WHEN they need it, they want it (or are too sick to know they do), but when they don’t need it, they most certainly don’t WANT it.
When people NEED hospitalization, surgery, medications, nursing services and all the rest, (and notice how much people don’t want to think about that - they invented the euphemism “healthcare” to describe it) - when they need it, “having the ability to purchase it” is absolutely, totally, 100% completely the last thing on their minds. So is organizing society so that it will be available. What is on patient’s minds at the point of need is death, or life - disability and disfigurement, or recovery. They do not know, or care, who pays, or how.
So, the Democrats have resolved the philosophical question that comes before the practical problem. They want to ensure that “healthcare” (by which they mean services) is given to all by the government without regard for ability to purchase (pay for) it.
Whether this is right or wrong, smart or stupid, practical or akin to skittles from unicorns is not my point. My point is that they have resolved the contradiction embedded in “lower costs, lower taxes, no mandate, ensure ability to purchase (pay for it) for 100% of the population”. The Democrats know what they want, and they are united and determined to have it.
The poor, stupid Republicans, OTOH, are divided about the underlying premise. They really do want health insurance to be cheaper without the lost revenue being made up by taxes, and they want no requirement to have it, BUT they also want “people that want healthcare” (again, whatever that means) to “have the ability to purchase it”.
This is incoherent. If hospitals, surgeons, drug manufacturers and nurses do not get paid for their services, they will no longer be available. Many, many people who NEED (and therefore “want”) those services cannot pay 1% of what they cost.
“Ensuring that people that want healthcare have the ability to purchase it” either means cheap insurance that doesn’t cover anything OR nationalization of the resources to deliver care to those who cannot, or will not, pay.
There is no middle ground. The Democrats know what they want. The Republicans don’t.
As Sun Tzu said, “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”
The Republicans do not have a plan because they do not have a philosophy that can support their opposed goals of more freedom for the well and perfect security for the sick.