Everett, Wash. Published: Wednesday, November 12, 2008
HEALTH CARE
Medicine, business are contraindicated
I voted for Barack Obama and I laud his determination to provide affordable medical care for everyone, but I fear that goal cannot be met within the current framework of the medical care business.
Medical insurance, medical equipment, medicine itself, and scores of hospitals and clinics are all for-profit businesses and most of them are traded on the stock exchange where maximization of profits is a requirement in the pursuit of investors. In this atmosphere, especially with the inevitability of massive lobbying by these business interests, the politics of the real world predict uphill battles and many failures in this pursuit of universal medical care. It's third grade arithmetic.
If you are waiting for the words "socialized medicine" and these words scare you, try to imagine your fear as this escalating money-hungry monster overcomes your budget and drug prices go up, and co-pays go up, and deductibles go up, and premiums go up, and your procedure isn't covered, and of course your salary isn't really keeping up with inflation.
Opponents of socialized forms of medical care like to scare you with dire predictions of poor care but the reality is that several countries much less wealthy than ours have put us to shame with just such programs that haven't seen any of these horror stories come to pass.
The promises of the wondrous rewards of unfettered, unregulated, pure capitalist competition are not a good standard in the protection of health and life -- just in case you haven't noticed that they have been driving it downhill at a frightening pace for the past few years.
The business of government is the protection of the people and I think it's high time we demand that they get down to business. Write your new president.
