The third of the disasters awaiting the country under this President is the complete and total destruction of our health care system. As a reminder, the other two are the appointment of the Supreme Court Justice and the implementation of a form of the Fairness Doctrine. Any one would be cause for alarm; all three are definitely a call to arms.

Our health care system is the best in the world. For evidence, I give the example that people in other countries come here to get health care, not to socialist countries. People come from Canada, England, Germany and France, where they have socialized “free” health care, to get treatment. Why do they come? They can get treatment right away and get the latest technology.  Countries that have socialized medicine always end up rationing treatments because of cost. Countries that have socialized medicine always postpone adopting the latest technologies because they cost a lot. Here, we adopt the latest technology and have treatments available to anyone.

Are there problems with our current system of health care? Sure, there are lots of problems. The biggest is that the government has become a player in the health care system and messed it up. The government needs to step back and let the system work. Government should be there when there are problems with health care, like poor treatments and the like. Government should not dictate what insurance may and may not cover for a person. Government should not dictate what a doctor should be paid. The health care system should determine those for itself.

We could easily reform the current system and not lose anything. We would still have the latest technologies and have it readily available. One of the problems is that people are not able to choose the coverage they want on their insurance. For instance, I am 60 and my wife is 61, yet we are paying to cover us for possibly having a baby. That is unlikely. We would like to have a policy without maternity care. If people could choose what coverage they want, insurance costs would go down. Also, everyone should be able to pick from the same list of things to cover. Policies would be portable, in that the insurance you buy in Arizona would be the same that you could buy in New York. This would make things easier for everyone. The insurance companies would save because the complexity would go down. People would save because they would not pay for things they do not want or need.

The second thing to do is have people set up health savings accounts. From these accounts, the people would pay for primary care. Catastrophic care would be covered by insurance. Doctors would then receive payments from the people’s health savings accounts instead of insurance. The doctors would be competing for patients instead of taking insurance payments. If you wanted more patients, you could lower your price and get them. If you felt you had enough patients, you could leave your payment the same or raise it. This would put market forces at work in medicine. Look at what market forces have done to eye surgery. When it first came out it was $1000 per eye. Now the cost is $300 per eye, for more advanced surgery. That is the kind of thing that would happen in this case.

There are other things that can be done to tweak our current system to make it better. These are a couple that I thought of. We do not have to take our system and make it socialist. Under socialism, the costs go up, the quality goes down and rationing goes into effect. That has happened in every country it has been tried. We would not be the one exception. The people that would feel the effects first would be the handicapped and the elderly. Those people would have their health care curtailed first to save costs. Their death rates would go up. The regular public would not see anything, except maybe to an elderly or handicapped loved one. By the time it filtered to the general public, the sense of entitlement would have become ingrained and it would be impossible to get rid of socialized medicine. That is the problem the countries that have it are having. They want to get rid of this massive problem, but everyone feels entitled to the care, even though it is terrible. We cannot let it happen here.

A couple of examples of rationing that I would like to point out from the recent past from Canada. One I saw when I was in Spokane last Thanksgiving. Canadian women were being sent to the US to have babies because the province (Alberta or British Columbia) had reached their quota for babies for the quarter and could not accommodate any more. Where would they go if we had the same system? Where would our women go if we had the same system? The second example is from back east. A man had a growth on his brain and needed an MRI according to his doctor. He was going to have to wait for 3 months to have one in Canada. He went to Buffalo and had the MRI. He brought the MRI back to his doctor and was told he was going to have to wait 6 months to see a specialist to determine if he would take the growth out. So, the man went back to Buffalo and had the surgery. He would have died without going to Buffalo. That is exactly what the Canadian health system wanted him to do. It is easier to pay for a dead person than a live one.

Socialized medicine would be the end of America as she has been for over 200 years. She would still be called the United States, but her heart would be cut out. Innovation and individualism that has been the thing that has made the difference in the last 100 years would end. We would turn into another Europe. We would exist. We would not try to excel. There is a huge difference between the two. I would rather try and fail than not to try at all.