Current government systems lacking

Take the current gov't run health care systems: Veterans care, medicare and medicaid. The VA has been lauded and excoriated for the job it does treating veterans. I've seen some great stories, but the horror stories are all too available from investigative reporters. Bottom line, there is little to emulate as being a potential improvement to non-veterans health care, by observing the VA. It exists to fulfill our obligation to veterans and the horror stories reveal only that government-run anything is at least as, actually more, likely to be inefficient, insensitive and abysmal as private health care. Extending government management to the rest of the system will only eliminate, not add, competition, and will thus only degrade the level of care elsewhere.

Medicare was started to apply a social security-type approach to senior health care. It relied on the same flawed logic and unrealistic financial scenarios as the SS system. Ultimately, the medicare costs have turned out to be 10 times what Americans were told they would be when the program was sold to Congress. Seniors are generally pleased, I believe, but it is an unsustainable system because it relies on non-seniors to foot the bill, where it could have been set up from the start to have workers set aside their own money in interest-bearing accounts to then spend as they see fit as seniors. That would have left the impoverished seniors to take care of and, judging by statistics I've seen, seniors are the richest demographic in America as a group, and we could all afford to have our contributions to Medicare go into our own accounts and grow interest, rather than the Ponzi scheme as currently configured.

Seniors using Medicare are a prime example of the socialization of health care: someone else pays for it; there's no need for concern for cost-effectiveness and limiting use of the system by the consumer; because the costs are born by the taxpayer, there's competition for those tax dollars and the only way to make the dollars stretch is to underpay the provider--which is just another way to make the rest of us pay when the providers raise the costs to everyone else.

Here's a fact bearing on the oft-stated line, by Obama, that you won't have leave your current plan if you don't want to. Regarding Medicare, similar things were said about seniors that had contractual heath care from their employers plans, that they would still have that and not be forced into Medicare. Well, that went the way of the dodo bird as employers, seeing a big reduction in health care costs for retirees, dumped their health care arrangements and mandated that they be enrolled in Medicare. No choice, and that is what will happen with the gov't/public option which will be, not competitive, but undercut the competition because it will not have to show a profit, but more importantly, will be competing with the benefit of taxpayer subsidies. So you will be paying taxes to destroy your ability to keep whatever health insurance you enjoy using now. Polling shows nearly 90 percent of people do like what they have--you will lose it when employers decide it costs them less to dump you into the gov't plan.

Medicaid is a system with the best of intentions and is a part of the reason the whole system is, in fact, going to hell as Democrats and other single-payer advocates attempt to extend the medicaid system, through the S-CHIP childrens coverage to ever-less-poor families, and ever-older children. You and I are the ones paying for it and it only illustrates that when the gov't-is-the-provider-folks get going, they ultimately will not stop until we are, practically, all getting services that we all, with an excessive helping of tax revenue from "the rich", end up paying the gov't to provide us our care.

Hence, my columns that have used the "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" Marxist approach of the first colonists to illustrate the inevitable downfall of socialism--those able to provide more than they need resent and shirk their burden of providing for those benefiting from their labor. Anyone foolish enough to point to Medicaid as something to emulate are advocating extending a financially unsustainable system to the rest of us.

Here's a challenge, advanced by other conservative columnists: Let the gov't show how it can economize and make more efficient and spend less by applying whatever brilliant ideas Democrats have to the government programs already existing. If so much money could be saved--show us with the above programs. Instead, we get the absurdity of the O-Dems proposing, with straight faces, that we will reduce the excessive spending on health care in America by spending $1 trillion, $2 trillion or more. That the news reporters do not laugh the spokespeople off the podium for proposing such absurdities only shows how the MSN's has become nothing more than a part-to-full-time p.r. arm of the Obama/Democrat government.