By Gen LaGreca
Michael Moore says he made the film, "Sicko," to "ignite a fire for free, universal healthcare." How absurd is it for someone seeking proper healthcare to take an odyssey to Communist Cuba? That Moore's camera-rolling entourage would receive the same healthcare as a Cuban citizen stretches even a child's imagination. His film should be renamed "Another Celebrity Falls for Dictator's Dog-and-Pony Show."
People like Moore believe capitalism is the disease and government takeover the cure for our healthcare ills. They think people have a "right" to free healthcare simply because they need it.
If so, why stop at medicine? Couldn't we claim the same "right" to other necessities? Take food, for instance. What if the government seized control of the food industry and fed us for free with a new entitlement, "Foodcare"?
Initially Foodcare will empty the horn of plenty into your lap. With your appetite and wallet par ting company, the lobster you ate only on your birthday will become regular fare, as will your favorite Belgian chocolates and filet mignon.
Because the same idea occurs to 300 million others, costs skyrocket, and a Foodcare crisis develops. Big Brother can no longer foot the bill for your busy mouth, so he must limit your mastication. This requires new agencies, bureaucrats, and a 100,000-page rulebook.
You visit your favorite restaurant to find it changed. Gone are the tablecloths, flowers, and cheerful hostess to greet you, enhancements you had gladly paid for in the price of your meal. The Department of Restaurants eliminated them as frivolous indulgences of the people’s resources.
The menu is reduced to a few modest offerings. Missing are the savory specials of the talented chef, whose last creation took forty pounds—not of ingredients but of paperwork—to gain approval from the New Recipe Administration.
You want steak, but getting it requires that the chef call a central office to obtain pre-authorization. With the clock ticking and a long line waiting to slide into your barely warm seat, you order hamburger instead. You notice your neighbor eating steak—and sitting at the best table. You remember when he was laid off and you bought him dinner. Back then, he thanked you for your charity and quickly got another job. But now that he has a "right" to food, he's stopped working to eat courtesy of your tax dollars.
You barely recognize the frazzled chef buried in paperwork. The once happy figure doting over your every need now slaves for a new master, one that denies his fee for serving Cognac, second-guesses his decision to make cheesecake, requires a Certificate of Need to buy an oven. You know that under Foodcare he's merely biding time till retirement. When he goes, you doubt he’ll be replaced because enrollment in chef’s schools has dropped as the number of bureaucrats hounding them has risen.
As time passes, e veryone forgets how it started, but the crisis worsens. Michael Moore makes a pilgrimage to North Korea in search of adequate food.
You realize that the amount you pay into Foodcare exceeds what you had paid when you bought your own food and didn't obtain it for "free." Then you didn't pay for bureaucrats and inspectors to tell you what to eat, or for those milking the system like your neighbor. Besides emptying your wallet, Foodcare has drained all the pleasure you once derived from eating.
Politicians blame their scapegoat, the capitalists—grocers, chefs, food manufacturers—and pass laws to prevent any from owning a Mercedes while someone goes to bed hungry in America. They tell us profit is evil and free food for all is a moral ideal.
You wonder: Is there something wrong with this picture? The ideal isn't the private system, with happy chefs and grocers earning a good living in return for their talent and entrepreneurial skill, and satisfied customers enjoying a Shangri La of affordable food. The ideal isn't a spectacular abundance, with everyone's standard of eating—including the poor—raised dramatically, and this achieved without government force—without fleecing taxpayers and robbing consumers and suppliers of their freedom to make their own personal choices and to interact voluntarily. Instead, the ideal is to transform free, self-determining individuals into state-controlled puppets.
The Foodcare scenario is actually playing out in healthcare. Once the gold standard of the world, American medicine has fallen to its knees from decades of crippling regulation, with the final blow about to come from universal healthcare.
To stop this despotism we must repudiate the notion that healthcare is a right. No one has a right to demand for free the goods and services produced by others. We have the freedom to take action to further our own lives—to work, earn money, and pay for the things we need—while respecting the same rights of others. We don't have any right to enact laws to seize people's money, control their activities, and force them to provide services on terms dictated by Big Brother.
No good can result when the means used to achieve it are plunder and coercion. Universal healthcare merits the label "sicko"—or more accurately "tyranny."
Genevieve (Gen) LaGreca is the author of Noble Vision, an award-winning novel about a doctor's fight for freedom in a state-run health system.
Tequila Rose
76 Comments
The delivery aside, I think that the underlying message is sound. I believe that humans are fundamentally lazy by nature (with lots of exceptions of course. And people do like to be challenged from time to time). The path of least resistance is just natural. When we solve problems, we look for the simplest, most efficient solution and expend as little energy as possible. Its just simple economics. If you can get something for free, and spend your time doing something else to enhance your life, rather than working, I think the majority of people would probably go for it.
I'm not saying that our healthcare system is perfect (far from it). And I certainly want to see people that really need the care to get it (I think most of the time, they do). But I fear that any universal government program is eventually going to fall prey to the same underlying human condition.
If I do see Moore's movie, it will simply be to gather more information on the subject. I don't think getting more information to make better decisions ever hurt anyone.
I agree, however, that Moore's film will probably be biased in Cuba's favor, since he is nearly always questioning American policies that seem harmful to the less privileged or marginalized segments of the national or international population. I visited Cuba in 2001, and while socialism has its perks, it did seem like the quality of life in Cuba was somewhere in the realm of third world country status. Castro would like us to believe this is because America is choking the island to death with an evil embargo, and that's what many Cubans believe. I think that the matter is more complicated than simply saying the embargo is to blame, or Castro's government is to blame. I fear that if the embargo is lifted, Cuba would lose some of its cultural essence if American corporations were to infiltrate and start making profits. That would be a sad turn, because in its isolation, Cuba is a rich, glorious culturally diverse country, in many ways untainted by the nuts and bolts of capitalism. It has a sacred feeling that I'm not sure would remain if it were impacted by globalization.
While this is true, there is very clear economic evidence that Cuba's current poverty is virtually entirely due to America's embargo, which by the way includes statutes threatening other countries with a similar embargo if *they* trade with Cuba. Most Latin American countries won't trade with Cuba, and those that do are very poor themselves. There isn't really a lot of food or money to go around.
I think the American embargo against Cuba is very sad. It represents a government using the starvation of a country's people as a lever with which to move a government it doesn't like. Whether or not Cuba's government is oppressive and/or evil, which it may well be, the embargo shows a lack of concern for the lives of people who basically just want to live.
As another point to add in here, the Cuban people were starving before the embargo, too, but because of corporate reasons, much like the rest of Latin America: American health and safety regulations don't apply to American companies operating outside of America; a part of the reason why China is such a lucrative place to get labour. During the 40's and 50's, the United Fruit company served as the sole, near-monopolistic employer of almost the whole population of Cuba, most of whom were starving then as well as now; and Batista was at least as dictatorial and militaristic as Castro.
Anyway, this isn't directed straight at you; I think what you said was great. I just wanted to get my point out there, and this looked like a good place to do it. :)
A right to food, well, European governments pay welfare benefits that allow people enough money for food and housing (perhaps not very good food/housing), which they can spend as they wish, and you have rather different welfare benefits including food stamps. That doesn't seem to have affected the good restaurants here or there.
(Is LaGreca a kind of second-rate Ayn Rand?)
I think a big problem with our combined nations' people is that they are increasingly able to censor their environments. 100 years ago, communication was slow, and people had ignorances based on the fact that the information simply wasn't available. Now, the information is available, but people are employing their ability to be selective with it and tune out what they don't like. As someone who wants to know 'the truth', whatever it is, I try to pull out something from 'the other side' of whatever my current standing decision is, and consider it honestly for a minute, to see if I can come up with some well-founded points against it.
Anyway, having said that, I haven't seen the movie either, and I'm not racing out to do so, even though I do believe in public health care.
;-)
Anyways, the total bill is around $10 grand and includes ride to the hospital (4 blocks), x-ray, crutches (the wood is coming apart from the sides).
In all, I was in the emergency room for two hours before I was kicked out.
Beside me was a French guy who was in a car accident. He was in a neck brace and could not bend anything. The nurse came in and told him it's time to leave and she walked back out of the room. The guy had barely any clothes on and his bag of clothes was all the way under the bed. There was no one there to help him.
The guy had to make his way to the hallway and asked the first person who walked by to help him with his clothes. This was shocking to me.
Ok, the next part. I didn't have my insurance details with me and I didn't know the procedure for all of this. If I didn't do it correctly, I would not be covered.
I was supposed to pre-book the ambulance with the insurance company! I was lying on the ground in the middle of the street until the ambulance picked me up!!!
I thought it was a joke when someone told me this. Ok, now I am out of pocket a couple of grand for the ambulance.
Next, I am supposed to pre-book the person who is taking the x-ray, which I didn't know, as I was lying there, full of painkillers, not a care in the world. Another few grand for this thing that I forgot.
So, I basically have to pay for everything done in the emergency room and ambulance, comes to about what? 3 maybe 4 grand? I can't think about it.
Anyway, I am looking for donations.... lmfao, noooooooo
Fortunately, and I only found this out after the fact, this happened to me while I was working, so workers comp foot the whole bill.
Can you imagine if I was not working? Well, if you have read this far then you already have.
Healthcare in this country SUCKS OUT LOUD
and im sure glad somebody cares enough about the issues to look into them
To begin with, that it would not work for food does not mean it will not work for healthcare of course, these are two totally different products. people will not use medical care more and more if they are healthy as they would eat more and more if it's free. Making such a point of it not working for food only proves to me that you do not have these strong arguements when it comes to healthcare.
maybe there are a few things to see against completely free healthcare, but at least in a civil society it should be affordible for everyone, not only for the rich.
and you say making it affordable for everyone is like stealing from people who could be making a profit! that's utterly disgusting, and symptomatic of the every man for himself- attitude we see from america more and more these days.
It can't possibly be a way to construct a healthy society.
and that is exactly why - because of the pharmaceutical companies jacking up the price
why are we allowing them to lobby our representatives??? why is our representatives sticking by those companies and not the american people?
They can't be stopped.
If they can, then how?
And I've had that first hand from women working in clothing stores local... A few were once asked why they didn't seek a better job when they had 3 or 4 kids and some had another on the way... They openly admitted they don't want a better job because they wouldn't get money from the government :-
I can accept the fact that there are people out there that are more intelligent, richer, more motivated, and that's OK. Without the innovators and the people with money that can propel us in new directions our society and our race would stagnate and die. Look up my heros list on my profile. You'll notice that they all fall into this category.
That felt good. Thanks. :-)
-JB
I shoot straight and from the hip... I always respect others opinions no matter how much I may be opposed!!! EVERYONE IS UNDENIABLY ENTITLED TO THEIR OWN THOUGHTS!! I hold that value extremely high!
I even posted that I say what I'm thinking right or wrong and won't appologize for my own thoughts! All I ask is the same in return.
jbravo never fear your own mind question it from time to time but stand true to what YOU feel is right! if you feel it think it then don't be afraid to say it.
In the end REAL people with open minds and honest hearts will respect you more for speaking your mind and sticking to what you hold in your heart! weather they agree or not!
Stay true to you
later everyone
IV
Instead of rewarding people for being irresponsible, they should be educated to understand the whole picture. The whole picture being; when there are people abusing the system, like these clothes store employees, it hurts the system, and people who have a genuine reason for seeking these benefits, may be denied.
I feel very strongly about this subject, and it eats me up inside, as a taxpayer, to see people openly abusing this system. And they have no shame.
I live a block away from a housing project, and every day there are pimped out Lincoln Navigators, Mercedes, bmw's, Lexus', the list goes on. Some of these cars cost more then the average suburban one bedroom house.
And these people are living for free, on my tax dollars. And yours!!!
Where is the justice in that? That’s why we have to pay so much tax!
IV, you should know… NJ has the highest property taxes in the country.
I think that the healthcare system is not the only thing in a shambles.
Rant rant rant, blah blah, whatever... *L*
Am I wrong in my views? Is there anyone who feels the same way? Or feels that I am wrong?
If competition forced quality, we would have quality products in the stores to purchase. We don't; things break far more quickly now than they did 20 years ago, and more quickly then than 40 years ago. Competition forces maximisation of profits, which only implies quality if people's purchasing habits are intrinsically tied to quality, which they aren't. What you can more-or-less guarantee about the corporation is that its financial breakdown maximises profits, at least to the extent that this can be recognised by the company's board of directors. What we see in virtually all large corporations is that a much large quantity of money goes towards advertising than towards product improvement. This, together with the maximisation of profits idea, implies that what competition does is force more advertisement.
Regarding people standing on their own: Noone stands on their own, not you nor anyone else. There's a reason why most of the young people who quickly become wealthy come from parents who are already wealthy; that's because they are not standing on their own, they are standing with support from their parents. I think this is actually part of what the "sins of the fathers" biblical quote is metaphorically trying to say: people from an abusive family are more likely to be abusive. People from an undereducated family are more likely to be undereducated. People from a poor family are more likely to be poor. And so on.
Actually, take one of your own statements as an example: the parents who take child support cheques and use them to buy luxuries, while their children go without. Do children who are raised in this fashion have an equal kick at the can to others? For that matter, we can extrapolate from this what the parents of the faux-Gucci generation were like: after all, they learned somewhere that that behaviour is appropriate.
Regarding the point about not seeking a better job: to a poor person, each dollar counts for more than to a rich person, because each dollar impacts more closely on your basic necessities: food, clothing, and so on; and also on your addictions, of course, which in many cases can come to supersede your basic needs (see the previous point, above). If I'm struggling to get by on a certain stipend, and I have the opportunity to get a 'better job' (by which I assume you mean 'better paying' job) that will result in me (a) working harder and/or longer hours, and (b) having less money, between the extra daycare, and the loss of income from welfare payments, then it's kind of a no-brainer for me. I may very well *want* a job (I've met very few people who didn't actually *want* a job: welfare people tend to have their pride and their desire for more money and a better life, just as much as others do); but it may not be a workable equation for me. For this trend, I would blame the nature of a system which cuts benefits on par with income.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't want to stifle anyone's desire to have a better life; quite to the contrary. But, I don't want to see people starve and die because they fell on hard times, because the economy was rough, because an accident happened at work which wasn't covered by their insurance, and so on. Further, I don't want to see kids raised in a situation that they aren't given a reasonable set of tools with which to get out.
People will never stand on their own; people are inherently pack driven. Our whole society is a large and complex interdependent machine, which the economy is one way of modelling. The falsity in this viewpoint is in the sense that the successful pulled it off because they "stood on their own" while everyone else gave up or failed. In many cases (but by no means all, I agree), the successful built upon a stable foundation, while the unsuccessful built upon one which was not stable.
Now, quite to the contrary of the communist agenda, I actually think that a healthy capitalism depends on the presence of a stable foundation for the people who participate in the system. The welfare folks do represent a drain on our resources; like crime and corruption, one that will always be present to some extent. A healthy capitalist economy would be created by trying to minimise all of the draining elements, and maximise the effectiveness of the people. We can see, based on the presence of conversations like the one you described above, that the current system by no means maximises the abilities of the people. Your argument seems to be that this is because of the presence of welfare and support structures which maintain the draining elements; my argument is that, without those support structures, the draining elements would spiral out of control, and we would quickly be in a state that has been seen in the Laissez-faire capitalisms of the 19th century, and can be seen in many corporately driven dictatorial countries now: a huge pile of poor and uneducated people, a small number of rich people, and no skilled labour with which to build and maintain a technological workforce.
You can look at history to see the effects of different balances involving the presence and absence of welfare. Of course no example is 100% clear, because there are so many factors that influence the economic system. I was going to go into an example, but I'm on kind of shaky ground here, so I won't start throwing around conjectures.
thats just my take on it!
:)
steber2000 - Come over to the UK - free healthcare at point of delivery. Not actually free in fact of course, but paid for via a set contribution based on income level, taken each month from our pay packets as National Health Insurance to fund the National Health Service (NHS). But all who work in the NHS assume you have paid or will pay. No demands for payment are made in advance. Your life and health are a priority. And once you are retired (currently 60 for women and 65 for men, but to become 65 for both sexes in the near future) your contributions come to an end and all treatments are free. Old age and poverty are no bar to treatment on the NHS. And nor is youth and accident. If you are rich and prefer to pay extra for so-called private treatment. Fine. But all your health specialists from the top - doctors, anesthetists, nurses, radiographers,physiotherapists, etc, etc will have been trained by the NHS. There is no, "Private Health Training Service". All those very expensive consultants have been trained in the NHS, on patients who allowed students to observe or practice their skills on themselves. Whenever I read about consultants or wealthy individuals disrespecting the NHS or boasting about their access to 'hotel' type private hospitals, I think - how about the NHS patients who provided their learning practice. Perhaps these patients should sue them for a percentage of their private fees which are earned on the back of their NHS training. And no private hospitals in the UK provide emergency care. In fact if private patients become an emergency, they are hastily transferred to the nearest NHS facility.
Steber200 - your scenario wld just not happen here. Sadly the NHS is abused by visitors and incumbents alike. And unfairly criticised by many otherwise right-thinking but selfish minded people who either are, or think themselves, rich enough to do without it and care little about their neighbours. But without doubt it is one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century. At base, it is derived from the principle of helping our fellow citizens and to halt suffering caused or exacerbated by inability to afford proper healthcare. The French have copied it to some extent and my experience of their hospitals and medical care is excellent. In fact all EU countries have reciprocal healthcare.
A family member took sick during the night and was rushed to hospital. If it was not for the paramedics en route to the hospital, she would have died. There was no talk of money or anything of that nature. When we got the bill, it was promptly paid. A few hundred pounds!
Hats off to you guys. You know how to treat your sick and injured.
I have had experience in Spain too, and Ireland.
They all have similar systems, and guess what? They work!
Thats all anyone wants, is a healthcare system that works.
This one works for those who stand to make a profit. They treat it too much like a regular business, except for the fact that the customer is always right.
I'm also skeptical of nationalized healthcare or anything else, because of what I believe about human nature. I am pleased to hear that people have had good experiences with those systems. I don't know enough to be able to comment on the relative cost and its burden (or lack thereof) on society, the quality of care, etc. I will keep an open mind to solid evidence people can provide.
I do think a truly competitive system can work. But I'm not hopeful that it would be possible to get past the complications of getting it going in the first place. Such a system would also have to take into account the needs of those less fortunate. Also, the costs of administering such a system would negate some of the benefits.
If there were a national healthcare system, I would still want those with the means to be able to buy superior care. Not because it would directly benefit me, but because, as I mentioned previously, I think this would be important for innovation that would ultimately benefit everyone.
I honestly do not understand what you mean by this. In the UK the people who pay for private ("superior?) health care in the UK pay for hotel facilities. Not for superior medical care. The medical care in the UK is the same for all. But the only emergency care is provided by the NHS. If you opt for private health care on top of NHS - all you get is a possibly slightly earlier appointment with a specialis/consultant and a (possibly) slightly earlier option for surgical treatment. Due to private medical insurance provided by my employers, I have experience of both systems for myself and my family and have to say that apart from the privacy of a nice room ( hotel facilities) the medical treatment and care was of the same high level.
I should add as well, though, that there's layers of insulation in there. You can still have private pharmaceuticals with a public healthcare system; the government taxes the people, and uses the money to buy medicine from the pharms. This is pretty much how all public healthcare systems work. The actual research is primarily being done in a private setting, and hence can still be motivated by competition.
A question arises too, sort of side-long to this whole question: how do you ensure competition in a world where corruption, lobbyism and bribery is so common? Taking the RIAA for example, much of the crap that they are getting away with here is because they have the copyright board making strictly ludicrous and anti-competitive laws in their favour, actually taxing people and funnelling the results directly into a private organisation's pocket. Something I'd like to know is how to prevent this from happening, not just with something (arguably) nonessential like music, but with something fundamental to people's lives, like healthcare?
Yes. What worries me slightly is the thought that it might be (my inability to decided whether that's so lies behind my failure to reply, as promised, to jbravo). Because this is where the incentive argument might hold. We in the UK have private pharmaceutical companies alongside a public health system but it's possible to argue they would stop R and D if the US stopped paying so much money for their drugs.
I don't though actually believe that, but if it is true they won't do the necessary R and D if deprived of their obscenely large profits (as opposed to rather more reasonable ones) then something 'socialist' should be done about them!
I add that we tend to talk here as though incentives were monetary only, or rather, as if only money acted as an incentive and more money were always a greater incentive. But in fact, David Beckham would happily play football for less money than he gets from LA Galaxy, though probably for a different club!
how do you ensure competition in a world where corruption, lobbyism and bribery is so common?
that's really difficult. You're better at dealing toughly with white-collar crime than we are, particularly at the upper levels (e.g. Conrad Black), we are I think better at coping with lobbyists but then your lobbying system is, for historial political structural reasons, far larger and more powerful than ours.
But on the larger question, whether markets can work purely and perfectly, the answer's always, or almost always, no.
Also, I'm doing some quick research in the CIA factbook to see about relative national purchasing power parity. It'd be interesting to see if the US dominates the EU, India and China together.
Germany: $2.63 trillion
UK: $1.93 trillion
France: $1.891 trillion
India: $4.156 trillion
China: $10.17 trillion
...so it looks like China and India together dominate the US in terms of adjusted buying power. I'm not sure if unadjusted buying power is more relevant to the discussion. I also don't know what percentage of the country's wealth is spent on healthcare, which probably affects the outcome more; it is starting to look like the US probably does drive pharmaceutical research, though probably not by a large margin.
On the other hand, I don't see a connection between someone's level of healthcare and a promotion of innovation. I also don't see how a healthcare system could be made especially competitive, as anyone who needs the service they provide is guaranteed to be over a barrel. Competition and capitalism work pretty well when everyone has a chance to say no and go the other way; that's why the stricture against monopolies. But there's two problems there: Sometimes the nature of the scenario doesn't allow for choice, and sometimes long-term effects (like education, training, addictions, and the like) inhibit people's ability to make those choices.
So my proposal would be for a semi-capitalist, semi-socialist system, where governance is used to ensure that people's ability to choose is protected, and that where a choice is impossible, people are guaranteed humane treatment.
Unfortunately, this is where we part ways in terms of our opinions: I can't morally condone a floating healthcare system, precisely because it represents a scenario in which the basic freedom of choice is not present. No one, neither rich nor poor, can avoid being subject to potential gouging from an unregulated healthcare industry. Theoretically, a plurality of insurance agencies helps, but in practise, the plurality isn't wide enough, and people can't adequately measure the quality of the service they're getting because it's so complex, abstract, and distant from the mind at the time of purchase (who buys insurance without hoping they won't need it any time soon?).
But it;s not worth ten grand! (see previous post)