Barack Obama is trying to force his health care plan down the throats of Americans with as little discussion about it as possible. He wants no information about the plan to get out. He is going around the country telling everyone that they will not notice any changes to their current health care plan if his plan is adopted. If that is the case, why do we even need his health care plan? He will say to cover everyone, but the plan being discussed in the Senate covers the same amount of people as the current system. In other words, there are 37 million uninsured under Obama’s plan and supposedly 46 million currently uninsured. That is hardly enough of a difference to make any radical changes in coverage.

The plan being discussed in the Senate has a big hidden problem. That problem is the “public option”. That is a government sponsored health insurance plan. If that is adopted, all employers will quickly drop their current health insurance coverage and adopt the “public option”. That would eventually put everyone under the “public option” and give America the single-payer system that Democrats covet. They covet the single-payer system because it gives the government a great deal of control over the citizens of the country.

The Democrats love to talk about the wonderful health plans of England, Canada and Australia. All of them have single-payer systems that are similar. All of them are now starting to allow private health care options because the single-payer systems they have cannot meet the demand. We do not need to follow after the plans that are failing. We should continue the plan that the single-payer systems are starting to emulate.

I spent two years in England between 1970 and 1972. England adopted the single-payer system shortly after World War II. At that time, England and America had health care that was roughly equivalent. By the time I was there in the early 1970’s, England had not progressed very much beyond the health care of the early 1960’s. I had a couple of opportunities to visit English doctors while I was there and was appalled at the shabby conditions that existed. The rooms the doctors used were larger than American doctors, but they were not stocked with enough medical equipment to supply the doctor. When I was there, the doctors were still all English. Now, the doctors are almost exclusively foreign born. That also goes for Canada and Australia.

The medical care is being rationed in England, Canada and Australia. Over Thanksgiving 2008, I visited Spokane, WA. While there, I read the local paper. It was reporting that Canadians were having babies in Washington because the hospitals in Canada had met their quota for the year and would not admit the women. I also have read about patients that have had to come to the United States from Canada to get medical care when needed. They were put on lists and would have died before they could have seen a doctor. In Australia hospitals limit specialists to a small number of surgeries per quarter. It does not matter how many patients need surgery, only that number of surgeries can be performed. That is the kind of thing we can look forward to under a single-payer system.

We have the best medical system in the world. There are problems that exist with our current system. Almost all of them are either directly or indirectly caused by government interference. The best way to reform the current system is to get government out of making requirements for medical insurance. That is just a scam to help their buddies in the health care delivery system. If everyone was allowed to choose their options, insurance would be cheaper. If we could take our policies from state to state, insurance would be cheaper. We could learn a lot from the car insurance system. If we modeled the health insurance system after the car insurance system, insurance would be cheaper and more people would be covered. There are other options that may be better. The one thing we cannot do is allow the government to compete with insurance companies or get into offering health insurance at all. That is a recipe for disaster.

We do need to make some reforms in our health care system. What we do not need to do is throw the baby out with the bath water. Tweaking the current system will deliver more good than any new system could possibly deliver. Changing our system to something else is not about delivering health care. It is about control over you, the citizen of this country. A “public option” is really a recipe for the government to step into your life and tell you how to live.

I prefer to live my life the way I choose. I am an American and was born to freedom. I was not born to be a slave. I will not be a slave to anyone. If you want to be a slave, support the “public option” and kiss your freedom good-bye. If you value your freedom at all, call your congressman and both Senators and tell them you want no part of the “public option”. Then, make sure they follow your lead. If they do not, work to defeat them in the next election. That is the only thing politicians understand. Make sure they know you are serious and they will listen to you.