Sipping on a cup of joe at my local Starbucks, I began thinking about the various healthcare proposals discussed by our candidates for President. As you may have seen in my previous post, ideas such as these produce consequences, many of which are not particularly good.
Anyway, as I continued, it seemed to me that the current set of ideas regarding healthcare reform are simply a contemporary version of good old 1930′s style Socialism. Perhaps cleverly written and poetically vague, all the same socialism it is. French writer Elie Halevy in 1938 said it best: “The socialists believe in two things which are absolutely different, and perhaps even contradictory: freedom and organization.” Is that not the promise? We will better “organize” healthcare and more people will have the freedom to receive the care the government thinks they need.
This quote seemed to put it together for me with regard to the healthcare debate. Most of the complains regarding healthcare are regarding costs, and of that the transaction costs, (insurance billing and such). Some estimates suggest that those costs are as high as 21% of US healthcare expenses, frankly I doubt that. Regardless, the question remains, is socialism the solution.
In reviewing the healthcare program of Hillary Clinton I happened across the following section:
Now just think about this a bit. The proposed solution of fixing a problem of an existing governmental bureaucracy is to replace it with an even larger one; now just why should we be optimistic? The United States healthcare industry is the largest in the economy, and passing that along to the Government to manage is nothing different than good old fashion socialism, in effect, more “organization” and less freedom.
Tom, couldn’t agree with you more. Handing anything over to governmental control is not a wise course of action, but anything that compromise 1/7th of our national economy and growing is a course set for disaster.