Can someone explain the health care 'crisis' to me?

[bluesbassman]

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Nature of the crisis:

Cost of health care per capita is unreasonably high.



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Uh-oh. Whenever a leftist thinks the price of something is "unreasonably" high, get ready for calls to trample liberty, with disastrous individual and economic costs.

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Public health, preventative medicine and community-based general practice are in decline as boutique specialists and high-end diagnostic and surgical procedures increase.


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If true, maybe because that's what the public demands? Nah, the central planning high-priests know what's best.

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Pharmaceutical research is wholly profit-driven.

The health-care professional culture is increasingly entrepreneurial, rather than motivated by public service.


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And as any entrepreneur can tell you, satisfying the public is NOT the way to make profits. That's why only the wealthy can afford restaurant food, basic retail items, and consumer electronics. If only the government had highly regulated those industries too, things like computers, cell phones, food, and clothes would be cheap and widely available even to middle and lower income folks.

Those brilliant pharmaceutical researchers, greedy doctors, Bill Gates, and Sam Walton are all to blame for unreasonably high prices in health care, computers, and goods. The government should step in and make their respective industries unprofitable and serve the "public interest" instead.

I don't want the most brilliant minds working to cure diseases or to develop new procedures, which is what will happen if health care is profit-driven. I want those people to become government bureaucrats or trial lawyers, of whom we need more.

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A two-tier, public/private system (with emphasis on the public part). Universal health care does not have to mean nothing but comprehensive "socialized" medicine.


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Translation: Socialized health-care sounds bad, so let's call it a "two-tier" system with "emphasis" on the public part.

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A general acceptance at every level of government that basic health care is a fundamental right of all persons in the United States, including guests, and particularly the very young and the very old.

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And if a particular good/service becomes a "right," then the producers of that "right" become slaves. Good idea, especially for health-care.

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A re-dedication to health care screening for elementary school children, less emphasis on "parents' rights" on this issue, more emphasis on fundamental dental care and nutrition.

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To hell with the "right" of parents to decide who may poke, prod, and "screen" their own children. That is not for THEM to decide, and besides, it is necessary to keep the socialized... er, I mean "public two-tier" health care costs down.

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Government support for "orphan" drug research and a change in the basic model of the pharmaceutical sector to bring it more in line with public health demands.


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Yeah, if those [censored] pharmaceutical companies weren't so profit-driven, they would better satisfy the needs of the public!

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If the society should ever opt for a two-year period of national service for all young men and women (as I have long believed it should), the entry phase should focus profoundly on individual health issues -- identify deficiencies early and fix 'em pronto. This is another opportunity for fresh medical/dental graduates.

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Great idea, let's not only enslave doctors, but everyone. You score points of consistency, if not morality. Such a national "service" provides an additional "opportunity" for recent medical school grads. Arbeit macht frei!

This is all necessary to bring down those pesky, "unreasonable" health-care costs.