Ups and Downs of Free Market Health Care and Ups and Downs of Socialist/Government Health Care?
Question:
Ups and downs of Free Market Health Care
Ups and downs of Socialist/Government Health Care
I debated this topic last fall, so I was wondering what you all thought of the topic. Give logical arguments!
Answer:
Have you ever been to military medical in this country? That's what it will all be like if we make it government controlled. I hope you like waiting.
We do have the best system in the world. True, people who don't pay anything for healthcare won't get it fast, they won't get it unless they are sick, but they will eventually get it. But they'd rather have money for fun, cars, and cell-phones. Health insurance really isn't that expensive. Get a second job at Lowe's like my co-worker and work 20 hours per month.
I'd like to see a free market medical system. I know what we have now is not that. The Big Pharms have all the power and the free market is totally suppressed. Hell, they want to make alternative medicine illegal. What kind of free market is that?
What we have now fosters greed and corruption.
Socialized medicine may have other problems... there is no perfect system. But ours is provably thoroughly busted, and should be gotten rid of.
Almost anything is better than the mess we have now.
I keep telling this story because it says it all. My wife got a second degree burn. We went to an emergency room. She saw one guy, who bandaged her hand after putting vaseline on it. We were billed 1,000 dollars. the bill claimed she was seen by nine specialists and had three shots... but it was vaguely itemized, with no verified details. Of course we will never pay them.
When people tell me how bad socialized medicine is, I tell them this story and it seems to shut them up. You can't get worse than 1000 clams for a bandage.
The primary argument against socialist/government health care is that the government has never successfully administered anything. Social security is a joke. Public schools (as a whole) are a joke. Even the post office is pretty much a joke (compare it to the private entitties of FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc.).
So, based on the history of how the government operates things, socialized medicine will become even more expensive, we'll just pay for it somewhere else other than in our health care bills (income taxes, use taxes, sin taxes, fees).
Also, the quality and availability of health care services will become horrible. Without free market factors, people will have much less incentive to provide medical services, and no incentive whatsoever to provide prompt and courteous service (DMV, anyone?). Canada is seeing this in the extreme. Sure, you can get a heart transplant really cheap, but you have to wait seven years to get one. What good is a cheap heart if you die before you get it?
One major reason our health care system is pricey is because the quality of it is amazing. Everybody gets pretty good and prompt care. Even people without health insurance get good care, they're just forced to go to the emergency room for things others go to a doctor for. So it's inconvenient because they have to sit and wait, but they still get the best care in the world.
I don't mean to make our health care system sound great. It has several severe problems. But letting the government take over will only make everything worse.
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