Letters to the Editor
curmudgeon2
Published Letters: 414 Editor's Choice: 64
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Who pays the piper calls the tune...
[Read the article: "Sicko"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That is the fallacy of socialized medicine. There are only a few ways to ration a scarce resource: charge a high price so that only a few can afford it; do it by lottery; do it by queuing; do it by some sort of standardized selection process. The socialized systems do it by queuing and by a standardized selection process. In a sense all resources are scarce. If the government is put in charge of critical resources it will inevitably bow to special interests and bureaucratic pressure and deny access to the resource to selected members of the population. The denial will be done "fairly", by the governments definition.
I do not want the legislature or it hired bureaucrats to make my medical decisions. I also don't want insurance clerks to do it either. So what is the answer?
Most chronic illnesses are self-induced. Smoking leads to emphysema at best and lung cancer at worst. Obesity leads to heart disease and type 2 diabetes (and probably a multitude of cancer types). Alcoholism leads to liver failure, and brain shrinkage.
I like Health Savings Accounts (HSA) because it allows those who make good life-style decisions to save large amounts of money for the problems they might face when they hit Medicare and the inevitable rationing that is almost on us. The major med that accompanies the HSA will protect each of us from the medical catastrophe that can accidentally happen to any of us. When my daughter "retired" to become a full time mother she lost her insurance. To get on her husbands insurance would have cost her $300 a month, and she would have lots of copays and deductibles. For $80 a month she bought a $5000 major med and puts the difference into an HSA. They are protected against medical catastrophe and in two to three years will have over $5000 saved up. Her husband earns about $55,000 a year so they are definitely not members of the wealthy that the criticizers of HSAs claim are the beneficiaries. But they are very frugal and are able to save quite a bit of money, despite having a substantial mortgage, and the usual costs of raising two children.
Many of the people who bitch about the costs of medical care think nothing of spending $5 a day at the Java Hut, eating out a lot, and having other costly habits. Many of them probably have some amazing life-style habits that contribute their need for excessive medical care.
To snowball999: the docs are just as much part of the problem as Big Pharma and the insurance companies. I like my doctor friends, but I believe they are as corrupt as anyone else in the medical business.
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To walter_map and tulkup
[Read the article: "Sicko"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't want socialized medicine because I think that 90% of modern medicine is bullshit, socialized or private. It's pretty obvious to any intelligent person that most medical treatment is unnecessary. Nearly all drugs cause more problems than they cure. Most diseases are self-limiting, but the medical system is addicted to intervention.
I thought I pointed out that some form of rationing is inevitable in any allocation of scarce resources. The fundamental problem with medicine is that it has created a false scarcity, by convincing many of us that medical intervention is a necessary requirement for good health. Most of my and my wifes friends take a multitude of prescription drugs, and firmly believe that they enhance their health. They select medical interventionism in lieu of very modest changes in their lifestyle.
My wife has had glucose intolerance, which is a precursor to type 2 diabetes. All her friends told of the wonders of glucophage and its brethren, and she could pig out all she wanted if she took it. She elected to cut out carbs and in two months was not longer glucose intolerant. No doctor told her that was an alternative. She could have easily become a chronic patient, which is what the medical system wants. I suffer from aortic valve stenosis. The docs strongly urged various forms of intervention. I rejected all of them and took up marathon running, and a high fat diet instead. I go in for an ultrasound every five years or so, and horrify the docs with the evidence that my way improved my situation. I have no doubt that if I took their advice I would now be a chronic invalid.
I don't want to subsidize the volunteer "sickos", either through socialism or capitalism. Of course I could get something despite my best efforts, and that is why I support some sort of socialized major med system. I have been on Medicare for almost 10 years. In that time I have spent far less than $1000 and most of that was for an ultrasound.
I, and many like me, strongly believe that we know better than the medical profession what is good for us. We, as a group, will probably make little use of modern medicine You need our money, we don't need your treatment. At least very often.
BTW, we don't expect to get cancer, since that is a disease of vitamin D deficiency (otherwise known as sun exposure, sans sunblock). Perfectly well known to medical science, but not widely known to patients or docs.
Any form of compulsory medicine will steal from me to support an utterly corrupt medical system, either by capitalism or socialism. If an HSA system existed through my lifetime I would have hundreds of thousands of dollars in a tax-free account right now to cover anything that might happen to me.
I believe that with major corrections, which the states can experiment with, the present system can evolve into something acceptable to us curmudgeons and the rest of you.