Shef, the issue is that when a person is spending their own money, they will make their own rationing decisions based on their own personal priorities. Further, if I don’t like the care I am getting, I am perfectly free to go elsewhere, a choice that citizens of Canada actually have to ask permission to take.
I refuse to place myself at the hands of some self-interested acutary who decides what he will cover and what he will not. When I contract with an insurance company, I know before hand what the contract covers and what it does not. Further, I can ask government to enforce the contract.
When I place myself at the whim of government, there is no “contract”. Coverage is at the whim of politicians and bureaurcrats who can change the rules as they please. If they make a mistake, they probably won’t even lose their jobs.
What deficiencies that exist in private insurance can be addressed far more quickly and at no expense to government than for government to take over the industry.
In the UK, the National Health Service is the largest employer in the country. Of course, all its employees seek more funding. As a result any conservative response to the mess that the HNS has made is how they can run it better than can the liberals, not in how health care could be privately delivered.
Recall that the initial interest in the health care issue was to cover the “47 million” uninsured. But this number is false. Only about 12 million actually don’t have insurance due to no fault of their own. I refuse to insure illegal aliens. Millions of people could afford insurance but choose to not buy a policy.
So, what agenda is in play when, to cover 12 million uninsured, the proposal is put forth with 49 new bureaucracies, to seize control of the entire health care industry? This is the question that the advocates of this plan hope you never ask. They want power over us, and in a way that ensures that power gets its claws in the body politic very firmly so we cannot shake it off. If we lose this battle, we may very well never recover our lives, our liberties or indeed our happiness.
