Imagine that you’ve gone to your local area hospital Emergency Department with excruciating abdominal pain. You don’t know what’s going on, all you know is that your doubled over in the most pain you’ve ever had. What would you think if the physician, without knowing much more than your age and weight, immediately gave you a large dose of Morphine, thereby taking away your pain. Would you be satisfied? Would that be all you needed? After all you came to the ER because of pain and now your pain is gone, shouldn’t you be OK with that? Anyone willing to accept that treatment as sufficient and final?
This is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves. We have some pain of approximately 40 million people without health insurance (which, by the way, I don’t believe) and Obama wants to give us a big shot to take away the pain. What if that pain is trying to tell us something we need to know? What if the “cure” of removing the pain ends up masking a greater need that in the end gets worse and more expensieve? As you struggle to manage your affairs of your family and love ones, you are already subidizing indigent care either through your existing tax burden or through the prices you pay when you do go to the hospital. It may be untidy, but additional government intervention won’t make that any better, just more expensive.
Only when you are convinced that somehow people become infinately more intelligent and equally more magnaminous when they work for the government, does government healthcare make sense. You would also have to abandon any effort to improve efficiency, because improvements in efficiency are the result of people struggling with the pain of inefficiency. With the government involved, the pain goes away because it is shifted to the taxpayer.
If, however, you suspect that government people are not much different from you and I, then the notion of governent intervention in healthcare is much less comforting than one might hope. Government healthcare may allow you to feel comfortable for a while, that is until you are actually sick.
Finally, do not think for a moment that being uninsured means that anyone is going on without basic healthcare. If they are, it is not because we don’t care, but maybe that they don’t care; that is, it’s just not that important. There are a multiple of choices for people to receive the basic care they require that doesn’t involve a large amount of money. Sure the wait will be longer, and you may not see the physician or care giver you preferr, but it’s good care all the same.
In the end, the government is seeking to promote a crisis that does not exist, so they can provide if not impose a solution only 13% of the US needs. The solution may not be a good one, and it may not work, but that’s not important, they just want a “solution”. This is about a few people feeling good about themselves and nothing more.
Thomas A. Coss, RN
