Q: I think Every US citizen is entitled to inexpensive and affordable health care, including preventive care. Dental care should be considered preventive care, too. Show me a Republican who cares that my sister lost a tooth because she lost her job.
A: First of all, it’s Republicans who are passing the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Johnson Administration of the 1960’s. It might not be everything you want, but they’re clearly on your team. Give President Bush and his Republican Congress some time, and they’ll eventually pass what Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton can only dream about.
My main question to you is: by what right and on whose backs are all the inexpensive health care (including dental) services going to be granted? When you direct your elected officials to provide health care on demand to everybody, there are consequences. The government is not creating this health care. It’s simply turning the people who already work in the health care field into its slaves. They now work for the government, like it or not. In Canada, they’re even told what part of the country they might or might not live in based upon what the government determines as need. It’s like being drafted into the military for your entire life simply because you had the misfortune to choose medicine as your profession. Under any variety of socialism, physicians must ultimately answer to government officials and respond to the whims and desires of the political interest groups who have the most influence at present. Politics replaces objectivity in medicine and this no more serves the interest of the patient than it does the health care provider.
It is true that in the United States we have the remnants (fading as we speak) of a compromise system. It’s not all out socialism. Government has become involved enough–by paying for most health care, especially for the elderly, and now for prescription drugs–to create many of the consequences of socialism: longer waits than would otherwise be the case (though not as bad as Canada); less quality of care than would otherwise be the case (though not as bad as Western Europe or, more dramatically, countries trying to climb their way out of Communism). One very common thread between health care in the US and outright socialized health care is the tragic decline in the doctor-patient relationship. Simply put, doctors now work for the government (in the case of Medicare patients) and for the government-regulated and managed insurance collective (in the case of younger patients who belong to HMOs and PPOs). The results are what you see around you every time you go to a doctor’s office, with rare exception. You see doctors who are in some cases arrogant–they don’t need you as customers, after all–and doctors who in other cases are so hassled that they can’t even concentrate properly on what you need.
It is true that for non-Medicare patients, insurance companies still make a profit and this clearly does not constitute total socialism. But the level of government control and mandates are so strong now that insurance companies can hardly be called innovative, private-sector enterprises. They operate as private companies in name only, with the government breathing down their backs constantly. The system is a mixture of free-enterprise and government control, and it will break any time now, especially with Democrats and Republicans firmly united to nationalize what’s left of the private sector.
Don’t worry. You’ll get your “right” to free health care and probably, before too long, dental care too. Your sister will probably get taxpayers to pick up the tab for her dental work. Just keep in mind: you get what you pay for. As you continue to throttle health care providers and their practices by sending your elected officials after them, the results will be exactly what would happen in your own profession if I elected my representative to go after you. Imposing force upon your doctors via the political process is merely a polite form of sending, say, the mob after them. If you think public schools and post offices can be bureaucratic, unfair and dysfunctional–you haven’t seen anything yet. Actually, you’re seeing a lot of it already.
