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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (140597)	4/25/2001 6:49:13 PM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Rush a propagandist? "Calculated rants?" Surely you recognize a holy warrior when you see one. Very funny article, using Hitler is a stroke of wellllllll...imagination....not! Wednesday, April 25, 2001 Political medicine Americans will rue the day they let government run health-care system In medical practice, multiple treatment approaches usually show that there is no single best treatment. But just because there may be no best treatment, some treatments can still be worse, or altogether wrong. And so it is with health-care policy. The search for a best solution has become so frustrating for the searchers that many large medical organizations are calling for a single-payer system - with the government covering everyone. It seems simpler. It sounds simple. What could be wrong with that? Some caring physicians have the attitude that a single-payer system wouldn't be bad because the government so far has left them alone or that dependence on government would somehow be better than dependence on their current employer. But the single-payer system cannot work if the lessons of history are any indication. We should be able to learn valuable lessons from one of the most prominent single-payer systems in the world. This system was developed over many years, with the advice of some of the greatest experts in the world, with minimal political bickering and with solid backing of the entire country. This nation even included the right to health care in its constitution. Yet this nation, the former Soviet Union, was renowned for the gross inequity and inadequacy of its medical system. For example, the doctors practicing in Moscow were essentially evenly divided into two medical systems. One system provided reasonable quality medical care for the nomenklatura, or party elite, who numbered about 5 percent of the population. The other 95 percent of the population was treated in low-quality hospitals and facilities by the other half of the physicians. Do we really want to make everyone's personal medical care the subject of a political experiment? Any single-payer system ultimately depends on government's monopoly on the lawful use of force. And who controls the government? The politicians and bureaucrats working for them. This points to another problem with the single-payer "solution." When there's a change in the political winds, it can be like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - a short period of transition from violent winds from one direction into equally violent winds blowing in the opposite direction. Political control of payment ultimately means that decisions about health care will be political, especially when the government decides it doesn't want to spend as much money as patients require or hospitals and physicians need to do their jobs. A single-payer solution would also foster even more of an entitlement attitude in the recipients. In practice, physicians note that some recipients of Medicare and Medicaid are demanding and non-appreciative. On the other hand, people who paid their own bills or were given charity care by individual physicians are usually more appreciative and interested in learning about their own ailments and how to manage them. We therefore suggest, if the government wants to stay involved in citizens' medical care, that it focus on people who actually need assistance rather than trying to control everyone. By using focus instead of force, government might be able to regain some respect from those resisting current attempts at central control. The single-payer system is not so simple or smart, especially given Americans' abhorrence of the long-term results of single-payer medical solutions. Americans should have the inalienable right to choose how they want to meet their medical needs. This founding principle alone should be enough to squash the idea of a one-size-fits-all monopoly. When freedom of choice is so important to Americans in every other aspect of our lives, why are we so eager to give it up in matters of life and death?