“You May Get Medical Care or You May Not…It May Not Be Your Choice”

The dangers of socialized medicine are real and your choices will be limited. To see just how dangerous health care reform is, that was hidden in the stimulus bill, see, “Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan,” a commentary by Betsy McCaughey posted February 9th on Bloomberg.com. The details are, to say the least, frighting.

Your medical decisions will be made for you, based on a cost-benefit analysis, which will hit the elderly the hardest, as revealed by the words of Tom Daschle who states health-care reform “will not be pain free….Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.” That means the elderly will bear the brunt of the nationalization of our health care system. This concept of “rationing health care” is based on the European model.

You will also be paying for health care that you will no longer be free to choose. And don’t forget that this new system must cover “45 million” Americans who can’t afford health care, so you will have to ante-up while watching your choices evaporate.

McCaughey’s commentary points out that your doctor will not have the freedom to give you the medical care you want, no matter how much you can pay, there will be penalties for violators. McCaughey writes,

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

Frederic Bastiat warned us back in the 1800’s when he wrote the following:

When the satisfaction of a want becomes the object of a public service, it is in large part removed from the sphere of individual freedom and responsibility. The individual is no longer free to buy what he wishes, when he wishes, to consult his means, his convenience, his situation, his tastes, his moral standards, any more than he can determine the relative order in which it seems reasonable to him to provide for his wants. Willy-nilly, he must accept from society, not the amount of service that he deems useful, as he does with private services, but the amount that the government has seen fit to prepare for him, whatever be its quality…

He ceases to exercise free control over the satisfaction of his own wants, and, no longer having any responsibility for satisfying them, he naturally ceases to concern himself with doing so. Foresight becomes as useless to him as experience. He becomes less his own master; he has lost, to some extent, his free will; he has less initiative for self-improvement; he is less of a man. Not only does he no longer judge for himself in a given case, but he loses the habit of judging for himself. This moral torpor, which takes possession of him, likewise takes possession of his fellow citizens, and we have seen entire nations fall in this way into disastrous inertia.*

With the socialization of our health care system those of us who can, will have to pay to cover the enormous costs of this new bureaucratic system which will add hugh numbers of folks who will pay nothing. Health care will become scarce, choices will be limited, or non-existent for the elderly, and the quality of care will diminish. This was done in the “dark of the night” without any public debate under the guise of a “stimulus bill” to save our economy. Is this representative government or government out of control?

*George Roche, Free Markets, Free Men: Frederic Bastiat, 1801-1850 (Hillsdale College Press and the Foundation for Economic Education, 1993), pp. 148-149.