One Last Parting Shot at Jack

I can't resist taking one last shot at you, Jacksmith.

From your blog:

You see, one of the most important aspects of a universal healthcare system is easy access, and patient protection. This is accomplished by having a single payer without a conflict of interest in patient care. And by having a payer who has the power to enforce minimum standards of excellence in healthcare delivery for everyone in the plan.

Obviously, you are not covered by Medicare and you do not receive your care from the VA Medical System. Otherwise you would not have made such an incredibly foolish statement as this one.

The only payer without a conflict of interest in patient care is the PATIENT. Any third party payer will always have a conflict of interest in paying for a patient's care, and that conflict is always monetary. Any third party payer, including the government, has the desire to spend as little as possible for a patient's care. For an insurance company, this is motivated by the desire for corporate profit. For a governmental agency, the motivation is to try to minimize the "waste" of tax dollars, for the agency will always be operating within a limited budget given it by the legislative body creating the agency. See the first few pages of Chapter 20 of Newt Gingrich's Real Change for a very good description of this topic.

If you think that the corporate world is more ruthlessly brutal in its mission than a governmental agency, then you must live in an alternate reality from the rest of us. If you think a governmental agency will ever have your best interests at heart, you must be certifiably insane.

Corporations can only go so far before they run off their customers and the physicians and other health care providers that they must have working with them in order to be able to sell their product. A governmental agency need not cajole cooperation -- it can mandate it through the power of bureaucratic or legislative action. A governmental agency need care only about what it wants, not what anybody else needs. And a governmental agency created as the single provider of "health care" will quickly become supremely ruthless in this endeavor.

After all, isn't this supposedly why we're entertaining this foolishness -- because "we're spending too much of our GDP on health care"? If this is the true motivation, then the created bureaucracy's only goal, and only interest, will be reducing the total outlay of dollars, patient care be damned.

That is the difference between you and me, Jack. You see government as a savior, as a benevolent parent which will always do what is best for its children. I see government as a bureaucratic version of kudzu, choking the life out of every aspect of our society that it intrudes itself upon.

As we know here in the South, kudzu must be fought against constantly to keep it from taking over. The same goes for government. But I forget -- you are a Communist. You are kudzu.