Cynthia Meyer, Staff Writer
Ideology: Conservative Republican | Writing From: Austin, TX
In the next few months, Obama and his team will be pushing his healthcare agenda through Congress and over our heads. Apparently, enough use of phrases like “urgency” and “national emergency” can circumvent debate in the destruction of the best healthcare system in the world. Aside from Capitol Hill, the media has also avoided this debate. ABC has given Obama a free infomercial to talk about his plan, they bar any opposition ads, and censor any legitimate counter arguments. Is this the right way to approach a complete alteration of the US healthcare system? Is this a change from the sleazy Washington politics that Obama campaigned so hard against?
In addition to eradicating a forum for debate, the Democratic Party loves using sob stories, playing the sympathy card to distract from the main point. Some people are sick, and some people are uninsured. Therefore, we must implement public healthcare! Sure, our healthcare system has its problems. But Democrats aren’t getting it; socialized healthcare– or “universal” healthcare– is not the solution, and will only create more problems.
The United States healthcare system is top-notch. We have the best doctors and services in the world. People travel from all over to get the best care for their needs. And right now this is all in jeopardy. Why do we have the best healthcare system in the world? Because hard working Americans run it, not the government. But liberals attack profit-motives, suggesting that wanting to make money is a bad thing.
REALITY CHECK: This “greed” that liberals say is so evil actually fuels the economy. Profit motives are incentives for people to make things better, and free market competition lowers prices for us, the consumers. “Greed” is the root of the American dream.
You can read blogs and articles defending socialized healthcare – here, here, and here—and see the rhetoric for yourself. All this talk of greedy doctors and insurance companies only out to make a profit, charging too much money, and leaving the American people out in the cold because they are money-hungry and selfish.
But what is being ignored here is that because of our free-market healthcare system, and because of competition (that will be eliminated if Obama manages to sink his teeth into it), doctors and insurance companies will charge as little as they can for your business. They want you to use their services, not the doctor’s next door. Yes, they also want to make money. But this is the beauty of “greed”: to make money in a free market economy, you have to try your hardest to provide the BEST care at the LOWEST price. Isn’t that what we want?
If Obamacare passes, we will get the opposite: worse quality care at a higher – or simply government mandated price. That is what happens when people don’t work according to the virtue of greed.
Liberals claim that this is not socialization. And that conservatives who are throwing around words like “socialism” are just being extreme, just trying to use scare tactics to sway the public. Obama says that with his plan, you will still get to keep your insurance, he is just opening up opportunities for the “46 million people” who aren’t covered.
First off, of these “46 million” uninsured, about ten million aren’t even US citizens, nine million live in households with incomes that exceed $75,000 per year (enough to purchase insurance if needed). Fourteen million are eligible for an existing government healthcare plan, but choose to decline. And these numbers are not including the millions who are young and healthy, and decide to remain uninsured. But Republicans are the ones who are overreacting and using scare tactics to pass their agenda?
What happens when the government provides a service to an individual that is cheaper to him than his own current health insurance? He will drop his current plan. Thus, employers will drop private insurance plans for their employees, since it will cost them less. So then what happens to these greedy private insurance companies? They will get more expensive, because of the decreased demand. Eventually it will not be profitable for private insurance anymore. The government will drive out private competition and control the healthcare system.
Democrats are dressing this up as just another “alternative” to “compete” with the private sector. Mr. President, we aren’t that blind.
When you pull in everybody–both people who need healthcare and people who don’t really need it– it is more costly and less efficient. Sure, there will be more healthcare available for those who weren’t insured before– but it won’t be nearly as good as today’s quality care. Also, this expansion of coverage is including the millions who are already healthy and wouldn’t need insurance otherwise. So ineffect, there will be less quality care available for those who actually do need it. There will be wait lists for crucial treatment. The excellent doctors we have today will be driven out of the industry because they won’t be able to make any money. If greed is so looked-down-upon in medicine, they will take their drive for profit somewhere else, along with their skill and competence.
But don’t listen to us conservatives. We just want Obama to fail.We aren’t concerned about the wellbeing of our country, right? Wrong. We care about our country and the health of our residents. Which is why we cannot let the best healthcare system in the world fall. Let’s just hope that if Obamacare is passed, you or your family members won’t be in need of urgent quality healthcare.
Once it’s gone, you can’t bring it back.
Great post! I agree that government-run health insurance is not the way to go. Those tax credits for buying health care are looking pretty good now, aren’t they? I wonder who came up with that…oh, John McCain!
On another note: doctors are already being driven out of medicine due to the high cost of malpractice insurance. In fact, a lot of the “higher costs” are due to that. Yes, doctors make mistakes – but because of the rising costs associated with being a doctor, they’re often understaffed and under intense time pressure and can’t give patients the time they deserve. I don’t mean to say that all patients who sue their doctors are greedy; however, there have certainly been some excessive damages rewarded to greedy patients and lawyers. Therefore, greed isn’t entirely a good thing. It helps and hurts our health care system. Honestly, malpractice law needs a serious overhaul much more than overhauling the entire medical system.
In response to your tweet pointing to your post above, I argued that profit is superfluous to the threat of death and disease as a motivating factor in the improvement of healthcare. Your response was to call me naive, which I felt was a deflection and you invited me to flesh my “arguent” out here. So here we go:
Naive is not recognizing that taxpayers already foot the bill for the vast majority of health care costs in America. Whether it is in the form of pre-clinical government research that leads directly to profitable drug therapies (at least 14% of all drug development derives straight from 100% government-funded NIH research and most of that is in much-needed therapies that have a low profit potential), or the subsidies provided to hospitals and clinics that serve the uninsured and under-insured, or individual subsidies through medicare, social security and disability (which fund most of the remaining 86%).
Taxpayer dollars funneled through efficient government-run programs literally keep private insurance companies afloat even as their defenders claim that government-run programs are inefficient to a fault. In fact, we get a tremendous bang for our buck with medicare, as the administrative costs of medicare are a bare fraction of the administrative costs of private insurers. The ONLY reason medicare costs more than it should right now is because conservative Republicans in the House insisted upon denying medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies in passing the prescription drug benefit. So the GOP believes in a free market, huh? The GOP abhors protectionism, huh? Seems like sabotage to me.
And just to put these to bed, even if 10 million of the uninsured aren’t American citizens (a statistic I find dubious at best), how exactly does their citizenship status change the effect of their cost on the healthcare system? Unless you think we can somehow solve our immigration problem as part of the healthcare plan, their status is meaningless. It seems to me that the private insurers would be perfectly happy to take the money of illegal immigrants if they could afford the coverage.
Taxpayers already treat children in South America for malaria, families in Africa for AIDS and a whole range of other maladies around the world. Why? Because it helps America to have trading partners with healthy populations that can afford to buy our stuff and it helps reduce the odds of pandemics in a world where populations are constantly on the move. We already treat those uninsured immigrants in clinics and emergency rooms at tremendous and hyper-inflated costs to the taxpayers. Illness-care can be hundreds of times more costly than preventive-care and anyone going to an emergency room is, by definition, not getting the early care that would have prevented the malady from reaching a crisis point in the first place and costing many times, often hundreds (not kidding) hundreds of times, more than the initial cost would have been with an early diagnosis. Why would the principles that apply in third-world countries not apply here? Do you think GM and Chrysler would be unhappy if more Americans (including illegal immigrants) could afford to buy their cars instead of spending the money on healthcare? Would that be a bad thing?
Nobody is arguing that doctors shouldn’t be allowed to make enough money to pay off expensive student loans and build decent lives for themselves and nobody is arguing that the developers of breakthrough medical technology shouldn’t be allowed to make a profit. The guy that invented the pacemaker – Otis Boykin – deserves all the profit he can get out of such an amazing invention. But what do the insurance companies bring to the table? What’s their contribution? Name one. Seriously, one… and good luck with that.
The conservative argument is essentially this: private insurance companies have an inherent right to be the middleman in the healthcare industry and have an inherent right to a cut of any money tranfering from patient to practitioner. The liberal argument (and by far the more fiscally conservative argument) is that the free market dictates that no consumer has an obligation to keep any company or industry in business, and since we’re already paying for everything, why don’t we cut out the middleman and pay the practitioners directly and leave those who prefer to profit from suffering to find something useful to do with their time.
Malpractice insurance would be another scam but the insurers soon discovered that its tough to get around court orders. Imagine the horror of actually having to pay on ALL the insurance claims that come in on a policy. No wonder it’s so expensive – they can’t ignore the court the same way they can their individual policy holders so the premiums have to go up to, what, cover the costs? Please. To continue to make a profit. A profit for suffering. Phenomenal. This is easily solvable with a national malpractice review board board (made up of appointed experts and elected representatives) that controls a pool of money derived from premiums paid by practitioners as a percentage of their gross income. There would be more than enough money to cover claims and cutting out the middleman would reduce costs across the board. It’s not the malpractice suits that are the problem, it’s the insurance scam that pretends to pay for it that is rotten to the core and needs to be abolished. Because, guess what – malpractice is real, it happens a lot and people suffer and die as a result. It’s amazing how often healthy people suggest that malpractice claims are the problem.
And I haven’t even mentioned the problems people WITH insurance are having. What’s the point in paying a premium when you know that the insurer will concoct any reason, including reasons that are patently false and even illegal, to deny even the most legitimate claims. For more on those stories, see http://stories.barackobama.com/healthcare. Yes it’s the Obama site, which means that conservatives will think every email in there is a lie dreamed up by Peter Orzag, but for those of you with a glimmer of open-mindedness, it’s not just revealing but heartbreaking.
Finally, the profit motive is precisely why we now have five different ways to get a chemically induced erection and zero ways to cure alzheimers. Greed is a fine motivating factor in a free-market economy… up to a point. Greed ALONE is destructive and counter-productive.
Hi there,
Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.
Dbnkik izezsprpqzef, [url=http://fhbouyiwnkig.com/]fhbouyiwnkig[/url], [link=http://oaowhawmhxak.com/]oaowhawmhxak[/link], http://uiklgtcevdwy.com/