A Spoon Full of Sugar

Reform Healthcare?

Healthcare reform may end up becoming a bitter pill.  Most of us remember Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins, singing, “A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down.”  Targeted as the priority of the Administration and the Congress, a concoction is now being brewed in a cauldron of nationalization that promises to sweeten the dosage of government dependency that is on the way – sweet without the calories for the taxpayers and businesses, but fattening for the federal government!

The issue was succinctly stated  by Scott W. Atlas, MD, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Professor, Stanford University Medical Center .  “The debate is not so much about these issues, rather, the question lies in their solutions.”  Scott went on to clearly state that  “To justify that nationalization is the road to salvation, the key players in American health care are being cast as greedy evil-doers by the Administration – “profit-seeking” drug companies; “nasty, cold-hearted” health insurers; “corrupt, unaccountable” doctors, and the like. But the grandest misconception being proclaimed by those interested in expanding government control over health care is that the American health care system is a failure, inferior to that available in the rest of the developed world. That misrepresentation is naively perpetuated by ill-informed media and furthered by many misguided economists who have accepted the severely flawed WHO report of 2000 without noticing its wide-spread criticism in scholarly journals as agenda-driven, with its embarrassingly large margins of error, problematic data analysis and input, and overt ignoring of any statistical validity. Regardless, many Americans have accepted this distorted analysis; the issues are complicated, and the lure of a government offering to provide everything as if someone else was paying, at this economically vulnerable moment in our history, may prove to be irresistible.”

Let’s look at the numbers.  According to columnist George Will, it is estimated that 46 million of Americans are without health insurance.  Five states hold about 39% of the total uninsured – Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.  Each of these states is also an entry point for immigrants.  Almost 10 million of the uninsured do not have US Citizenship.  Another 10 million have household incomes of $75,000 or more and choose not to have healthcare insurance.  As many as 14 million are eligible for existing government programs — Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, veterans’ benefits, etc. — but have not enrolled.”  

The solution that George Will proposes for the remaining 20 million persons who are protractedly uninsured because they cannot afford insurance is conceptually simple: “Give them money — (refundable) tax credits or debit cards (which have replaced food stamps) loaded with a particular value. This would produce people who are more empowered than dependent.”   Ah, but that lowers dependency and buys few votes in the process.
   
A favorite topic for high school debating classes in the 50’s was Socialized Medicine – for and against.  The name has changed and most of the debaters now have law degrees, but the potential for socialism remains the same.

Related: Government Dependency, Healthcare reform, Nationalize Healthcare, Socilaized Medicine

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.