This weekend I got a call from an activist pushing “health care reform” from phone number 701-255-2346. A few minutes of backtracking told me that it’s a personal residential number as well as the owner’s name and address, but I’m not going to post that information. In any case, the call went something like this:
Activist: Some nonsensical blather about compassionate health care, complete with skewed ‘statistics’, then: “What do you think about health care in America?”
Me: I think that the people who claim they want “national health care” or “socialized medicine” or “health care for everyone” don’t want socialized medicine. They don’t want nationalized medicine. They want what we have RIGHT NOW, except they want it for free. And that’s not what they’re going to get if the government is put in charge of it!
Activist: Oh, so you think that people who don’t have health care are lazy?
Me: No.
Activist: You don’t?
Me: No. But you accuse me of making assumptions of people, but you are the one making assumptions about me.
Activist: So what do you think?
Me: I think I’m on a cell phone, I don’t know how you got this number, and I don’t want to waste my air time arguing with you. Have a nice day.
It’s always instructive to watch liberals engage in exactly the kind of behavior they attribute to, well, anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Here’s a guy who accuses me of stereotyping “poor people” (when that’s not the sole demographic of America’s uninsured) while blatantly stereotyping me. Simply because I don’t want government health care.
Then there’s the example of the rocket scientist whose window appears in the photo above. I drove past this house this weekend, saw an old couple in the yard, and saw the signs in the window. The two cars outside were smeared with all sorts of bumper stickers for Obama and state & local Democrat candidates. The sign in the window wants “Health Care for America NOW!” but I doubt the old codger has taken even an instant to think of what that means for him.
Look at these nations with “free” socialized/nationalized medicine such as Canada and the UK. They’re rationing care based on “merit”. Who decides the merit? The government, not the patient. That means people who engage in certain behaviors, have certain medical conditions, or are elderly have a good chance of being sent home from the clinic or hospital so someone more likely to have a better outcome can receive medical resources instead.
From the look of the guy who put these signs in his window, he’s past the prime age for any sort of nationalized health care. But obviously a habitual Democrat voter, despite their inability to make good on any promise they’ve made to any of the victim groups to which they pander every election cycle, he’s been brainwashed into toeing the party line. Right now the party line is government interference in health care, and he’s sold on it. The sad truth is, should it be implemented, he’s going to me among the first to be denied care when resources are short.
I knew a guy who went to a hospital in Canada. By the time the months went by and they decided to maybe treat his brain tumor, he was dead. I’ve heard Canadians implore the USA not to enact government health care because, “where will we Canadians go to get treated?” They also pass along their thanks, because we spend all the money to develop new medications, and then they get them for free while we bear the burden!
yes, that’s right: health care and medication costs fund research and development. We pay more for our medicine here because medicine is expensive to invent. Those costs must be recovered. Canada, however, has put into effect price controls on those medicines due to their national health care system. That means the USA must pay more for the same medicines; after all, the drug companies have to pay their bills.
If prices are “controlled” here in the USA, you can expect the research and develpment to STOP. It happened several years ago with the flu vaccine: the Clinton administration forced the prices down so low that companies quit making the vaccine! Then, when there was a breakout of the flu, there were no vaccines. They had to be imported, and there was a shortage. Expect a lot more of that.
Like I told that guy on the phone, people don’t want government health care. Even those who say they do actually want today’s health care system, with its innovation, convenience, and technology…but they want “the government” to provide it. That ain’t gonna happen.
Regardless of whatever sort of term you want to apply to it, government-run health care is a horrible idea. If people such as the guy calling from his home phone or the fella with his sticker collection and signs in his window would realize what’s going to happen… heck, what has happened when socialized medicine has been enacted, they’d change their minds. We don’t need to follow Canada’s or Europe’s horrible example.
