We Can Have Better Healthcare

This can’t be the best we can do.

Being able to take care of your body when it is threatened is something on which we all agree. Heck, we created a Second Amendment to our Constitution to defend our life, liberty, and property – surely we also value protecting ourselves from tiny threats like viruses and other illnesses, and not just threats that can be stopped with a gun?

As Americans, we regularly and happily practice a little socialism here and there. We have no ethical problems having a government-run police department. There’s no moral quandary with having the government build and maintain our roads and bridges. You don’t see politicians taking out ads promising to get rid of the fire department.

If you’re fiscally conservative, opposing socialized medicine is irresponsible. Think about how it works now:

When you get insurance, you pay a rather hefty monthly premium to an insurance company. That company then takes your money and invests it, much like a bank does. The difference is that, with a bank, you can get all of your money bank with paid interest. With insurance companies, that money is gone, and the only way you get value for your money is if you get sick, or are lucky enough to have the treatment cost more than your co-pay, and hope that your insurance company decides to cover it.

Your insurance company has to pay all of the expenses of the hospital visit. In addition, they have to pay all of the expenses of their business selling insurance, and all of their expenses running their investing business. They also have to pay their stockholders any dividends they make on profits, and let’s not forget the giant salaries of their senior executives. In addition, you have to pay tax money to the government to have oversight agencies to ensure these insurance companies are taking care of their customers, and to carefully watch their investing activities.

With socialized medicine, you pay for the expenses of the hospital visit and you pay for the overhead for the government to maintain and run those hospitals and the system they run on. You don’t have stockholders to pay off. You don’t have an investing business to fund. And, most importantly, none of the money is at risk from bad investments. A big addition is the government could then use that massive buying power to negotiate better rates for medications, which have soared astronomically out of control.

If we truly value our life, liberty, and happiness the way we claim so loudly, then every American should be for a health care system funded by the taxpayers, and accessible to all.

We’re actually already very happy to support socialized medicine. Our veterans have access to a network of government owned and operated hospitals. ALL of us agree that that system is in need of a major overhaul, and that our vets need to be treated much better. Nobody talks about dismantling the Veterans Administration – we talk about fixing it.

Well, why can’t we do both? Why can’t we make our system of taking care of our veterans the best in the world, and then do the same thing for the rest of our citizens?

That’s what we should be doing.