Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Hiding the Pea

Economics, the Dismal Science, posits that everything has a price and that includes single-payer health coverage, aka Government health insurance. Price may be expressed in dollars, but it is rather often found instead in diminished service. Take the airlines as an example. 

You can buy a cheap fare on Spirit or Allegiant Airlines but everything - and I do mean everything - is extra fare. You have the smallest and most cramped seats in the industry, on-board service is not on-board, and if your plane has a problem, oh well, enjoy the delay or the pleasure of a cancelation because there are no backup aircraft. But you got your cheapo fare! 

It's no different with health insurance. We began to get a taste of this with Obamacare. Remember the smiling President saying if you wanted to stay with your doctor, why you could! And costs would come down by an average of $2,100 per family. Woo-hoo! And that worked out how? Service got cut and prices for those who can pay went up, way up, but hey, there's "free" health coverage for all these people and ain't that great! Cue the brass band and confetti. Let's look at how the brains behind the shills intend to deliver "free for all" health coverage.

Betsy McCaughey, writing in Townhall, has pulled back the curtain:
The lead editorial in the current issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, by Stanford economist Victor Fuchs, claims the way to make universal health insurance affordable is to curtail use of mammograms, costly new drugs and diagnostic technologies.

Arguing that the U.S. spends nearly 18 percent of GDP on health care, while European countries spent about 12 percent, Fuchs and other single-payer proponents claim Americans are too enamored with high-tech care. The answer, the left says, is to go low-tech. That argument would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous. Countries that limit use of technology, like the United Kingdom, have abysmal cancer survival rates.

That's right, basically everybody has the right to free, crappy medical care. If you can't get in for 4 months or more for the lump on your breast or that annoying cough that is really lung cancer, you are collateral damage so it's "free" for everybody else. Should you die as a result, well it's just one less mouth to feed. Oh, and any guesses what happens to income tax rates to pay for even crap coverage and the government deficits because there is not enough tax money to pay for all this? 

We need to have a real conversation on how to bring basic healthcare to those who really need it, but "free for all" care is a pipe dream and a vote-getting ploy by and for politicians, not you and me.

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