Kamala Harris announced her candidacy for President. She was just elected by the people of California to be their Senator, has been in office less than one month, and runs for the Presidency. If I were still living in California, I’d feel betrayed. I guess the Senate is job security for when she loses.
During her announcement speech, she said she would advocate for Medicare for all. Healthcare is now a fundamental right. You don’t even need to work for it, someone else who does will be forced to pay for you.
There is, of course, those pesky financials behind a move this brazen. The financials that say that this would cost trillions of dollars, and if we doubled the tax on every American, it would still not be enough. It is a bankrupt plan before it starts. As it is now, with only seniors on it, it is on very shaky ground. People take far more from the system than they put in. It is mathematically impossible to sustain the deficit.
Also forgotten in Ms. Harris’s plan, is that being a doctor is a business. It used to be a lucrative and rewarding business, where doctors could earn a good living, and could give patients good healthcare. The law of unintended consequences will be that there will be far less people willing to go into a profession in which income is limited by the government, not the free market. Less people will be willing to have the government dictate what services their patients would be allowed to receive. Far less people will want to spend the crumbs the government gives them on hiring additional employees to handle the volumes of paperwork required to get paid. This will create a huge shortage of doctors, surgeons, and specialists.
Instead of seeing a doctor, there will be more physician assistants, with far less expertise and qualifications than your doctor would have. People’s health would obviously and necessarily suffer. Wait times will become months for diagnoses and treatments. People will suffer the consequences of those wait times, including death. The medical system will collapse from the weight of the sheer numbers of people, including those illegally here, and from the lack of funds to sustain it, and the lack of new doctors.
Doctors tend to be among the smartest and most dedicated of professionals. They will simply take their talents to another profession that will reward their skills and efforts.
We all have a right to receive healthcare, when we pay for it. The working Americans who earn a living will see their money be taken for those who choose not to work, for those that are mentally and/or physically unfit to work (which are not being taken care of by our government now), and illegals. The working contributing American will see his/her healthcare choices and quality go so far down, they will revolt.
If the American dream of being able to prosper for your efforts is taken away, and the government, who can’t run a single program they are involved in efficiently and cost effectively, takes over managing the health and wellbeing of Americans, we, as a country are lost.
Any government who controls the health of its people is on the way to dictating their lives.
My healthcare is up to me and my doctor, and the government needs to stay out of it. The audacity of people like Kamala Harris to dictate to Americans that they will be limited in the type of healthcare they receive, and have to pay for others to receive it is absolutely un-American. I wonder if she plans to go on this same Medicare for herself and her family and live by the same rules she seeks to impose on us.
Her proposal also seeks to control doctors and who they see and how they run their practices and what services can be given to whom. The government has no standing to do this to private practitioners who have invested a great deal of time and money into becoming physicians.
Some form of health care may be offered that is low cost for those truly in need. It is wrong to seek to remove the private insurers from 200 million Americans that now have it, in order to serve the few who do not.
If, instead, we would develop a competitive system of insurance across state lines with varying levels of coverage that people can pick what they want for their insurance coverage and what they can afford, it would make more sense. Putting healthcare under the government would be disastrous for the health of Americans and create yet another inefficient and corrupt and inept bureaucracy. We will lose coverage, lose doctors, wait long periods of time for inept care, and lose lives.
Each of us should make and pay for our own health care choice. I am not opposed to subsidizing a very few who are incapable due to severe mental or physical limitations, but absolutely no illegal immigrants, and no one capable of working who just chooses not to.
When government controls your healthcare, we should be very afraid. It was part of the Nazi playbook; that should tell you all you need to know. Ronald Reagan, in 1961 was still a Democrat, but he wrote the following:
“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. . . . Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We have an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.
The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it’s only a short step to dictating where he will go. . . . All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won’t decide, when he’s in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.”
Medicare for all sounds wonderful, but it is a path leading to nothing good for Americans; be afraid.
