American Healthcare, Economics, and Politics

Washington, DC (TLS). Healthcare in the U.S. was bound to be a campaign issue with someone like Hillary Clinton running for President. People on the far-left have long targeted American healthcare as a golden apple just ripe for the picking in terms of their plan to gradually socialize the economic system of the country.

Healthcare is a perfect place to start, given that part of the system is already socialized, such as the government-run V.A. hospital system.

In addition, Hillary had already proposed sweeping changes to the system back in 1992 just after her husband was elected to the White House.

That proposal would have dismantled free enterprise in healthcare, placed physicians under the employment of the federal government, taken away the citizens' right to choose their own physicians, and ushered in medical care rationing based upon the decisions of someone in a massive bureaucracy hundreds of miles away.

The tax increases to pay for such a system would have been astronomical.

Yet Hillary is back, and this time she is running for President. And she has help in promoting socialized medicine with the Commie-loving movie-maker, Michael Moore, visiting his buddy Fidel Castro down in Cuba to show Americans how much better off we would be with a Communist healthcare system.

Our favorite intellectual, Dr. Walter Williams, economist extraordinaire, recently warned about socialized medicine. A small minority, less than 10% of Americans, do not have health insurance. This means upwards of 90% of citizens have health coverage.

With his characteristic wit and logic, Williams questions the rationality of dismantling an entire healthcare system that works for over 80% of the population in order to cover the small minority that does not have coverage.

Such a thing would be tantamount to dismantling the entire auto sales industry, streamlining and making uniform one single, small, utilitarian vehicle, made by the government, that would be offered to the masses for nearly nothing, so that people at the bottom 10% of the economic ladder would be able to afford clean, cheap transportation.

The only problem is that the other 90% or so would no longer be allowed to buy nicer vehicles. Everyone would have to drive the same thing so that the poorest among us would benefit.

For the rich this would mean no more Porsche. Bye bye Mercedes. And as for Jaguars, Vipers, Hummers, and other expensive toys of the rich--begone!

In short, such a view of economics is not only shortsighted, it is a study in abject failure. Such a system has never worked over the long haul. When people are not allowed to possess the rewards of their success and hard work, all motivation to excell is squelched.

At Walter Reed Army Hospital, the scene of the scandal involving vermin-infested rooms and outdated facilities that had fallen into disrepair, the shocking news came that at that same government-run facility the 'elites' get the deluxe treatment with luxury suites and all of the amenities of home, while our war heroes are treated to the bland uniformity of a minimalized facility where no one truly wants to be.

Does this really surprise anyone in a socialistic system?

The old Communist Soviet Union was run the same way. The masses were treated to 'socialized uniformity'--that bland and bare-bones way of living in government run housing projects, where residents shared one bathroom per floor. Yet the government elites within the Communist Party were treated like royalty.

In any socialistic system there are elites just as there are in capitalism. And those elites are treated better than anyone else, just as the rich are treated better in a capitalistic system.

Thus, in Hillary's 'brave new world' the elites will still get all of the best while the rest of us peons get the bland uniformity of socialism...such as being placed on a 10-year waiting list for a hip replacement, which is common in countries with socialized medicine.

And you could be dead before they get around to your name on the list for heart-valve replacement.

Does anyone honestly believe that if such a system were implemented in the U.S. that Hillary Clinton, Barbra Streisand, Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, George Soros, John Edwards, or Dianne Feinstein would be treated exactly the same way in the healthcare system as the rest of us?

If you believe that, I have some swamp-land in....well, you know.

The simple fact is that free markets always favor the masses, and the masses fare much better in a free market system than they do in a socialized system. As Dr. Williams points out, the auto industry does not stay afloat by making cars just for the super-rich. If they did, they would go out of business. Rather, the mass production of well-made, safe, and relatively inexpensive autos to 'the common guy' is where the big money is.

The same is true in healthcare. When the open market is allowed to function at its fullest potential, without interference from government, the system stays afloat by marketing healthcare to the masses. This is where the money is.

And that money has enabled American technology to rise to the forefront of the medical industry. This means new and better treatments can be developed.

Instead of dismantling the best healthcare system in the world for the sake of the small minority, why not instead address the issue of how to get those who are outside the loop insured?

They are ways to do this without throwing the baby out with the bath water.