An oped in a local paper recently called the expansion of Medicare a “no brainer.”
It’s another reminder of how liberals hate young people and even hate the sick.
First, you must understand that our current health care system spends billions upon billions “providing” health care that benefits Big Pharma and the rest of the medical industry, while often making our health worse.
A UNC doctor and professor has made it his mission to expose this. I have flipped through another recent book with much the same view. In Catastrophic Care, Author David Goldhill tells the story of his own father’s death and how it opened his eyes to the often catastrophic nature of our health care system. He begins his focus on Medicare, but the same applies to Medicaid. From the publisher’s web site:
Contrasting the Island of health care with the Mainland of our economy, he demonstrates that high costs, excess medicine, terrible service, and medical error are the inevitable consequences of our insurance-based system. He explains why policy efforts to fix these problems have invariably produced perverse results, and how the new Affordable Care Act is more likely to deepen than to solve these issues.
In short, because there is no real free market in health care, our health suffers. The problem is that our current system fails to provide a way to figure out costs, risks and benefits. Thus neither patients, doctors nor hospitals have workable incentives for good yet cost-effective treatments.
This is why the free market is morally superior. It allows us to make valid choices; it presents real options, and acknowledges our responsibility for choosing them. A free health care market would provide the truth, not deceptions, and would endow us us with the power to make our own choices. Ultimately, empowered patients and an honest system would provide better health care.
So Medicaid expansion will fail to improve health. Meanwhile it will suck money away from schools and other real needs.
Some advocates say it is federal money. Uh, where does that money come from? Much of it comes from taxpayers, thus taking money they could spend on their own children. The rest will be borrowed. It will come from the children, who will have to repay our huge federal debt. Every million dollars of federal spending means another $400,000 our children and grandchildren will have to pay.
Wasteful Medicaid spending just robs programs that could really help the ailing and the young. I still don’t get why liberals hate the sick and the young so much.
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