Health Control

Government provided health insurance will be more expensive for the individual than privately provided health care. Health and medicine are complex topics. If you apply the bureaucratic mentality to a complex topic, you always get oversimplification. In health care that means either inadequate funds will be provided for certain procedures, ensuring delays, promising only suffering and death. Or too much oversight will occur, ensuring needed medical treatment will be delayed, promising suffering and death. Or we'll get both, and that's assuming the whole apparatus will be administered fairly and honestly. That will go well with the Fair and Honest Politicians. Cough.

Inevitably, there will be a political test of some sort.... Do you have the means to provide this treatment out of your own pocket? Can you pay for a root canal? A tonsillectomy? An appendectomy? A traffic accident? Maybe bureaucrats and politicians think you can. Therefore, you're rich, too likely to vote for the other side, whatever, the government can delay treatment for you, deny treatment for you, make up new diseases for you.

Make up new diseases for you? Yes, Virginia, this has happened already. Remember during the Clinton administration when the Center for Disease Control claimed that "gun violence" (What's that?) was directly caused by private firearms ownership. Further, "gun violence" was called an epidemic under the Clinton administration (Did it go away? Or were the Clintonistas lying?). The CDC recommended charging itself with ending the "gun violence epidemic," since the CDC had defined "gun violence" as a public health issue. Health control, not gun control.

And back to the bureaucrats for a second. Health control will require control of research funding. From the public policy perspective there would be no sense "wasting" money on non-political disease. Even in genuine research, the people charged with running a health control system will not see all the angles, thus stifling research. Inevitably, the bureaucrats will be presented with some new avenue of research and deny funding. Witness the political drive to fund unpromising research in fetal stem cell research: There are numerous privately funded stem cell research projects going on in more promising adult stem cell research, but a batch of noisy politicians, and their willing accomplices in the Leftist controlled media, raise a stink about their fetal stem cell research not getting enough government funding.

Everything in this argument applies equally well to federal or state controlled health care. If you need examples of this screw up look at England's ineffective system, or Canada's (Many Canadians don't wait to die and come to the US for treatment. This takes a lot of pressure off their system so there are fewer complaints). In a few years you'll be able to look at the gathering storm in California, where the wait is already long and care frequently denied. And now the Left Coast's other darling, Washington State, is planning state controlled health care.

Isn't everyone entitled to government health control? Health is a right? That makes government health control a right? What a tangled web of lies and deceit!