Health Insurance: not a crisis … yet!
One of the staples of single-payer or government sponsored health care is that along with the “access for everyone” ideal is the requirement that “everyone buys access.” As I noted in Uninsured: Let the Truth be Told, the hysteria over this issue is misplaced.
If you are a single person under the age of 25 and take care of yourself … don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t engage in other risky behaviors … you will be compelled to pay for insurance even though you probably won’t need it. Many young people choose not to buy the health insurance their employers offer for just that reason: the $400 per month spent on a plan that also covers old coots like me is wasted money. For most young and single people, a simple rider on their car insurance for catastrophic health coverage if an accident occurs would cover them for the most likely way they would run up health care bills. And if they don’t have a house or other assets to protect, they feel that forcing them to pay for health insurance is providing them with “over protection”.
“HillaryCare” required everyone to participate, and what’s more, you could be fined for going “outside the system”. Now comes the reprehensible John Edwards, who not only wants to see compulsory participation in a single payer system, but also will require people to get mammograms, pap smears and other routine procedures:
“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”
He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of problem.” Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned and spread.
Source: Yahoo News, are reported at Captain’s Quarters, linked below.
I presume we won’t have to get colonoscopies. Edwards has already got that end covered.
Captain’s Quarters notes the alarming restriction in personal liberty, and how cavalierly proposals like these roll off the lips of the Democrats. Those in favor of managed health care should spend some more time in the local DMV, one of the state agencies that serves a large portion of the public in each state. Or call the IRS for the answer to a tax question. Or run down to the Social Security Administration in your local County Offices and see how quickly you can get help.
Our nation is huge. California alone has an “gross domestic product” of 1.55 Trillion Dollars, and it is only 17% of our nation’s GDP. If California were a nation, it would rank from 7th to 10th largest in the world, ahead of Spain, Canada, Mexico, Korea, India, Australia and the Netherlands. The US dwarfs these other places. It makes no sense to centralize health care administration in such a large economy, where a centralized administration is undoubtedly impersonal and inefficient.
Further damaging our health care system is bad enough, but the loss of freedom being proposed is truly alarming. I find it ironic that those who get agitated the loss of privacy when they hear of wiretaps think managed health care is a dandy idea. Compulsory health care is a loss of personal liberty, even if I will still be able to check out the book “How to Make a Bomb Out of an Airliner” without any governmental interference.
