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EternalHoH -> RE: Canadian Death Panel Thwarted (3/20/2011 7:23:18 PM)
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I have absolutely no problem with the nation coming down to a choice between a "medicare for all" or a "medicare for none" scenario. What is unsustainable, and what I do not support, is continuing our present course of "medicare for some", where these arbitrarily chosen "some" have access to all the heroic medicine they desire, paid for without question by the government, and carried out by elite doctors who are only in medicine for the private sector money, doctors whose standard-of-living is subsidized by those on the outside paying higher medical costs than those inside the medicare system.
If you are against government healthcare, then lets abolish medicare completely. Let the prices of private insurance policies dictate everything, from quality of treatment to who lives or dies, and let the MBMBNs of the world fight amongst themselves for the crumbs left behind by the private insurers still willing to do business after you subtract the government half of funding from the industry. The problem here is, most doctors and MBMBN types don't want any outside control thrust upon them, nor do they accept crumbs in their paychecks. Their vision of their industry is unsustainable. The failure of their vision is what drove this entire crisis to this point.
Its nice to say that private systems drive higher levels of health care. But who says those higher levels are sustainable, are affordable, over the long run, as this nation continues to equalize with the lower standard of living found behind the bamboo curtain?
You would think the libertarian view would deem healthcare as a right, rather than a condition of the quality of job a person holds. There is something inherently wrong with forcing the middle class and the poor to work to enrich the rich guys even more, simply to obtain the 'priviledge' to survive major illness. The rich guy in the top 1%, who by and large inherited what he has, doesn't have to work to enrich some other person to obtain the same 'priviledge'. You want to know why the top 1% are running away with all the wealth, this is why, the system we have now has that outcome engineered into it. We middle class people have to work to make the top 1% wealthier just for the 'opportunity' to beat back major illness and continue living. That doesn't sound very libertarian, very 'personal rights' oriented, to me. That's about as "libertarian" as saying only rich people are entitled to own guns.
And the truth of the matter is, Medicare has masked the downside of this systemic failure for far too long. Had Medicare never existed, a great wave of elderly uninsured, those who no longer work to enrich the rich guy, would have exposed the weaknesses of this system a long time ago. Medicare simply took the shit end of the stick and covered it with a rug. Its like when increased government hiring absorbed alot of the negative effects of NAFTA, making the pain of NAFTA less acute, keeping the revolt over it suppressed.
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