Posted on 05/05/2005 12:08:19 PM PDT by Hank Kerchief
I'm glad I read it when I was 18, before college.
I respectfully disagree.
It was the Medicare act.
ping
My dad was an OB-GYN who practiced from 1945-1978 in central California. His patients for the first 20 years were lower-middle-income ladies married to blue-collar husbands who worked hard to support their families so that their wives could stay home with the children.
In the 1960s, that began to change. Dad began to see pregnant, unmarried, unemployed high-school dropouts on welfare in the waiting room. They often abused drugs, and ignored his warnings about what this could do to their unborn children. They viewed having babies as certification of their adulthood, but felt no obligation--indeed, seemed to have no concept of what was needed--to raise their children responsibly, or to behave with responsibility themselves. They were paid generously by the state to keep having babies, and so had no motivation to do more difficult things like finish high school, develop employment skills, or get married, which would have resulted in a reduction of government handouts.
Careless of their own and their babies' health, they began to have problems during delivery and their babies began to be born with drug addictions or damage. They sued my dad, the hospital, anyone they could find to blame for the results of their own irresponsible behavior. Dad, who had never been sued before, was sued twice in 1975. Though he was acquitted in both cases, his malpractice insurance went from $6,000 to $36,000 in 1976. To cover part of the cost, he raised his pre-natal, delivery, and post-natal care fee from $300 to $900, and stopped writing off part of the fee for his poorer, paying patients. (Medi-Cal, California's medical welfare program, paid $140 per patient at that time.) His fellow OBs began to refuse to accept new patients; many gave up the OB side of their practices altogether.
After a third lawsuit in 1978, Dad retired at only 62 years old, leaving the work he had loved. Many of his paying patients wrote letters begging him to reconsider, since they liked and trusted him and knew they'd have trouble finding a new obstetrician. He and his responsible patients paid the price of the system imposed by the government and the welfare queens it created.
Any time I hear someone complain about greedy doctors, I make her listen to this whole story. And I thank any doctor who treats me, and express sympathy for what I know he's going through.
pinging all over
check back later, looks interesting.
The controlled substance laws are what got everybody used to the idea that the Federal government was in charge of medicine.
Without the controlled substance laws, Medicare would be nothing more than a dusty gleam in Lyndon Johnson's dessicated eyes.
Hey you found us out.
Can you protect yourself from the other people's knowledge? If you misdiagnose yourself, not only are you likely to die (a just punishment in this case), but you are likely to take many others with you (not necessarily justly.) For example, can an oilwell worker from Angola diagnose himself well enough to go to London?
I'm not talking about government protecting me from me. I take an antibiotic, stop using it early because I feel better, and then resistant bacteria develops that ends up infecting and killing you. That's the kind of problem I'm talking about.
Because of the nature of infectious disease, whether you get sick or not has nothing to do with what kind of pharmacy you patronize, and everything to do with the random event of you and I being in close proximity at the wrong time.
I don't think prescriptions should be required for most medicines (it irritates me no end that I have to get them for my insulin), but antibiotics and other medicines that may create resistance in infectious microbes are different, it seems to me.
The axiom of "If you want more of something subsidize it, if you want less of something you tax it". The government wanted more unemployed teenagers pregnant so they subsidized it. Sure enough you see what happened.Then take buisnesses. Lawyers can run whole buisnesses/doctors out of town even though they have done no wrong and are exonerated, they still pay a heavy price.
Yeah he made such a bad living off mediccine he retired at 62. Ohh the humanity. I think I am going to cry.
This type of discussion always degenerates into the most spurious and silly arguments. Of course the government has a security interest in stopping the spread of communicable diseases. That interst is not the motivator in the discussion we are having. Now we could define all sickness as as security interest and eliminate all freedoms with regard to medicine, oh wait, we have already done something similar to that.
I had the exact same reaction when I read "Atlas Shrugged" a year ago.
I found the antidote to "enraged."
"Restoring the Lost Constitution: A Presumption of Liberty by Professor Randy E. Barnett.
Now that you have the philosophical basis for liberty and freedom from "Atlas Shrugged," you can now learn the constitutional basis from "Restoring the Lost Constitution" to start exerting you protected and written down, locked-in liberties, as I have.
With Professor Barnett's "training" I have successfully stopped local government from taking private property from private property owners without just compensation twice (an historical district designation and a retail only use ordinance)and now am taking on a proposed "smoke-free" ordinace in my county.
I am determined to turn the tide from being a servant of government to the master of government, as it should be.
When medicine is run by the middleman, you get only middlin' medicine.
All that said, I must say that I still agree with most her ideas. Her insight was both radical and revolutionary in her time, as it still is now, and will be for quite a long time into the future.
Of all the great and wondrous advancements of the 20th century I would have to say the greatest was the discover of penicillin and anti-biotics.
Was this achievement made in the private sector or with government sponsorship?
I live in Australia where medicine is almost totally socialised. We are penalised a 1.5% levy on incomes to pay for it. Hospitals are badly managed, waiting lists for simple ops are years long, many patients die before getting their surgery, doctors are opting out of being told how much they can earn, ob-gyns are becoming a dying profession. Nurses have waited 16 months to get a pay rise of 3.4% a year over 3 years, whilst the pollies gave themselves a 9% a year rise for the next 4 years, starting immediately.
If Americans dont start to fight against this thing now, you are heading for the same disastrous scenario.
By the way, does anyone know where I can get this book?
Sadly the nursing unions and the doctors associations have also strongly been pushing for government control. First to protect their monopolies, then to attain the power that only they can perscribe drugs.
Infact it is also the doctors who are now pushing for all vitamins, herbs and minerals to be able to get only with a perscription - from them of course. Its hard to feel sympathy for them, when they have been and are still pushing the hardest for state control.
They tried this in Aus. but there was such a public outcry about not being able to buy a few vitamins they had to drop it. Of course, this is going to happen when the best minds just dont go into medicine because it is so controlled. You end up with mediocrity which does try to control everyone itself. That's when medicine becomes very dangerous.
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