Greedy, Heartless, For-Profit Government

Of the many points Michael Moore raises in Sicko, two stick with me.

1.  Insurance companies routinely deny service to patients as a matter of policy, and they do so out of a heartless sense of corporate greed.
2.  To solve this problem a government agency, with no heartless and greedy profit motive, is essential for equitable distribution of benefits.

Keep these two points in mind as you read this story.

Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision.

Two-thirds of those who appeal an initial rejection eventually win their cases.

But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.

The agency’s new plan to hire at least 150 new appeals judges to whittle down the backlog, which has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in 2000, will require $100 million more than the president requested this year and still more in the future. The plan has been delayed by the standoff between Congress and the White House over domestic appropriations.

There are 1,025 judges currently at work, and the wait for an appeals hearing averages more than 500 days, compared with 258 in 2000. Without new hirings, federal officials predict even longer waits and more of the personal tragedies that can result from years of painful uncertainty.

Backlogs?  Denials?  Years of uncertainty?  Where have we heard of all these things?  Oh yeah, I remember now:  Canada, the UK, Australia, and every other country with compassionate, “free” healthcare fun by the government.  But wait, it gets better.

Of the roughly 2.5 million disability applicants each year now, about two-thirds are turned down initially by state agencies, which make decisions with federal oversight based on paper records but no face-to-face interview. Most of those who are refused give up at that point or after a failed request for local reconsideration.

But of the more than 575,000 who go on to file appeals — putting them in the vast line for a hearing before a special federal judge — two-thirds eventually win a reversal.

Why, it’s almost like the government routinely denies claims.  You know, just like private insurance does.  But how can this be?  Government isn’t motivated by evil profit, is it?  They don’t operate with the brutal capitalist motivation, do they?  Government is the solution, isn’t it?  Government never fails us, does it?

The growing delays in the appeal process over the last decade resulted in part from litigation and financing shortages that prevented the hiring of new administrative law judges. In addition, the number of applications is rising as baby boomers reach their 50s and 60s.

Litigation?  The costs of litigation on rising insurance premiums are continually dismissed by compassionate Moore fans as nothing but capitalist propaganda.  But here it is, contributing to delays and waiting lists and misery in providing Social Security benefits.  But I’m sure that nothing similar will happen when government runs healthcare, will it Mikey?

And people wonder why we oppose government-run healthcare.  The government ponzi scheme is finally starting to fall apart, and the investors are finding out that they’ve being scammed.  What a complete fucking disaster.

But at least it’s a compassionate disaster.

GDP and Fingers

From Liz in Canada.

Mr K. and Mr. Lee,
I have been reading part of your site and, while on the whole I found it to be a little one sided, I found one opinion to be rather alarming.  The only mention I have found of this issue on your site is the following quote: “As the baby boomer generation ages, where are we going to get the money and resources to provide unlimited free healthcare?  Is it fair to saddle the current generation with a massive mountain of debt to do so?” While relatively harmless when only taken on its own, I wonder what the effect will be when others of my generation, the one who will have that massive debt, will respond to your quote.  The simple fact is that if not for our parents, who will require massive quantities of health care, we would not exist.  Was it fair to saddle them with the burden of raising us until, in some cases, the very late 20’s?  The current cost of raising a child is approximately 100 thousand dollars.  That does not even take into account the emotional responsibility as well as the difficulties involved in instilling a sense of responsibility and other , for lack of a better word, wantable attributes in another life.  After all this you actually raise the question is it fair to pay for their health care, to keep them comfortable, and to ensure that they feel as little pain as possible?  Perhaps you need to reevaluate your priorities ever so slightly.  By they way I am a canadian who has so far lived in ontario (universal health care) and alberta (more privatized) and I only have this to say: wait times may be high but there are less people missing fingers in ontario. I’ll gladly wait the extra time if it means getting the care i need.

Here’s my response.  My numbers might not be exactly right since I’m at work and wrote this from memory, but the overall theme is correct. Please, if you find more accurate numbers post them in the comments and I will correct what I wrote.

Elizabeth,

Thanks for a reasonably polite question.  Allow me to elaborate.  At the time Social Security was created there were more people paying into it than there were people taking out of it.  Thus there was enough money to finance the thing, plus a little bit left over. Piece of cake.

However, wherever there is a mountain of money laying around, and politicians eager to spend it to show that they’re “doing something,” there will be trouble.  So what the politicians have done is write themselves the world’s biggest IOU.  To put this in basic terms, imagine you had an empty jar on top of your fridge into which you put money for a rainy day.  Then, one day, you see a really cool stereo you want to buy. So you write yourself an IOU, take the money out, and spend it.

Then, when the rainy day comes, you have no money.  In this scenario, however, the only person who suffers is you.  What happened was the government opened the jar, wrote the IOU, then continued to write itself IOUs, to the point that there are currently something like $43,000,000,000 (that’s 43 trillion dollars) in unfunded benefits (i.e. IOUs) that the government has promised the baby boomer generation, who are now hitting retirement age.

Now, if you look at the boomer generation as a whole, they are the wealthiest single demographic in the entire United States.  The vast majority of them have no problem paying for their own medications.  They paid off their mortgages long ago, their children are grown and have college educations and families of their own, they’re doing just fine.  However, they’ve also been paying into the Social Security ponzi scheme their whole life and rightly want to get that money back.  Unfortunately, the government has already pissed it away.

So, how do we come up with $43,000,000,000?  There are one of two ways, we massively decrease benefits or massive increase taxes.  Since the boomer generation will be dead within the next two or three decades, and they are retired and thus not paying into the system any more (only withdrawing from it), they aren’t going to stand for any cuts in benefits.  So the only remaining option is to increase taxes to generate this $43,000,000,000.

To give you an idea of how much money this is, the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States is about $13,000,000,000 a year.  Again, to put this in basic terms, imagine you make $13,000 a year, and you have $43,000 in credit card debt.  How the hell are you going to pay it off?

So, as I initially wrote, is it fair to saddle the current generation, who have no stake yet in social security, with a $43,000,000,000 bill that they had no hand in creating?  If you made $13,000 a year, how would you feel being handed a $43,000 bill that you didn’t create?

So, don’t confuse what i wrote with “You’re a mean heartless poo-poo head because you don’t want to take care of old people.” The issue is a lot bigger and a lot more complex than that.  The problem is that you have fallen for Michael Moore’s schtick—“Anyone who disagrees with me wants to throw old people out into the snow.  Look, they don’t sew fingers back on in America!” This is, as we have demonstrated countless time on the site, complete bullshit.

Is our site one-sided?  Perhaps.  But if so, it is only to act as a counterweight to the one-sided stream of lies and propaganda that have you believing everything that comes out of Michael Moore’s mouth.

So, Elizabeth, you tell me.  Should a recent college graduate, starting his life, be instantly saddled with a tax burden of roughly $35,000 a year for his entire life just to pay for the healthcare of one of the wealthiest groups of people in the country?  You tell me, does that seem “fair” or “compassionate” to you?

It sure doesn’t to me.  Oh, and one final thought:  when your super wonderful awesome magical healthcare system, where everyone has sunshine and rainbows shooting out their assholes, fails to provide you the healthcare you need, you always have the option of crossing the border into the evil, heartless, for-profit United States, as millions of your countrymen do every year, fingers or no fingers.

The Pancreatitis Chronicles

Take a moment and refresh your memory by reading this post, specifically the update to it.  I just received a follow-up email from the author of that update, and I’d like to post it here.

Lee I am the guy that had the Pancreatitis that you featured in your post on right-thinking and morewatch.

I just wanted to let you know how the billing for this went. After spending 3 days in the hospital - in a private room none the less. After getting infused with bag after bag of drugs to get my body back on track and getting more morphine than an addict on the street for the pain I got the bill for the treatment.

$12,625.35

A hell of alot more than I can pay thats for sure. Hey your co-admin has Michael Moore to thank, I have the City and County of Denver and it’s taxpayers. I was told to go to the finacial aid office and after all is said and done guess how much I owe?

$100.10 Thats it $12,525.25 paid for by some unknown persons somewhere. I did not ask where they get the funding for this program. But thats not the case. The 100.10 that I am paying are proccessing fees! Fees that cannot be waived and that I must pay. So actually this financial assistance paid the ENTIRE BILL!

Who the hell says we don’t have free health care when it is required? And as I said before my care was top notch (allthough I was asleep most the time) in a state of the art hospital KNOWING I COULD NOT PAY THE BILL!

I can send you copies of the bills if you need them.

No, that won’t be necessary.  I’ve had the same thing happen to me.  When my father was admitted to the hospital in in severe cardiac failure, one of the first things my mother said was that we didn’t have insurance.  The head doctor, a world-renowned cardio-thoracic surgeon, said to my mom, “Don’t worry about the bill.  Your husband will get all the treatment he needs.  We’ll worry about the bill later.”

Not exactly the “dumped at Skid Row” scenario that Moore paints, is it?  Now, the Skid Row dumping in Los Angeles absolutely happened, and it was disgusting.  But he painted at as the norm, when it is clearly the exception, and the public was outraged about it when it came to light.  (Oddly, that aspect of the case didn’t make it into the movie.  What a strange coincidence.)

On the Road for Freebies

A reader from Canada makes an excellent point about Canada’s free healthcare system, one which never really dawned on me until brought up in this email.

Hello Lee,

My name is Eric and I’m from Canada, the magical land of super awesome health care. I been reading Moorewatch for a while and I totally agree with the things you say about Moore. Like a lot of other people I was made aware of this site by Sicko, which I thought was extremely entertaining for a movie but sub-par for a documentary at best. He really goes out of his way to make the Canadian system seem all encompassing and great but omits a lot of serious problems like very long waitings lines, the lack of equipment and treatment options, most of which you have mentioned prominently on Moorewatch. I thought the Boobies for Capitalism was interesting today because it actually reflects another more insidious problem that’s hurting quite a few people in the Canadian Health care system, and that’s traveling fees.

This may sound a big insignificant at first but when considering the geographical magnitude of Canada and the fact that certain types of treatment are only available in certain areas (ie. Vancouver or Toronto). So if you’re a rural family living in the outskirts of Saskatchewan who has a kid with cancer or some other serious disease, the best option for your kid would probably be the Vancouver Children’s Hospital. Since you’ll probably have to stay at least several weeks to get everything sorted out, your not only paying for plane tickets but also probably a month’s worth of living costs while generating no income during that time. It might seem manageable if you had savings, but Vancouver is probably one of the most expensive Canadian cities to live in (a recent study shows that people who earn about 100k annually Barely qualify as middle class in the city so if your only making 40-50 grand a year your pretty much somewhere between lower middle class and homeless) and those expenses will easily rack up to the thousands in a few weeks.

Of course since the current system doesn’t cover such costs despite the fact that many people incur them while seeking treatment it can take a serious toll on people who have to travel to different cities and provinces to receive proper care. This is probably one of the lesser talked about problems when we discuss healthcare over here but its definitely an important one that I wished Moore would have addressed.

Thanks for reading this and I hope your having a blast in China, if you ever get a chance to go to Tian Jing (it’s pretty close to BeiJing) make sure to check out their dumplings, its what the city is really famous for.

Best Regards,
Eric

That’s a great point.  Canada’s lack of things like MRI scanners has been documented many times on this site.  (There are more MRI scanners in the city of New York than in the entire country of Canada.) So while the healthcare may be “free” in some respects, you may have to incur astronomical fees in order to travel to obtain it.

This one hits particularly close to home.  When my father was dying I had to go on three months unpaid medical leave.  It damn near bankrupted me.  I maxed out my credit cards, I had to take out emergency high-interest loans, and I had to cash in my 401k and all my savings.  When he died I was flat busted, so I know just how expensive not working for a few months can be.  We had to drive an hour each way to get to the hospital, and we sometimes made this trip twice a day, so we were going through a tank of gas (roughly $60) every day or two.  That’s about $6,000 in gasoline expenses alone, let alone buying meals at the hospital every day, and this was on top of all the regular bills—my rent, the mortgage on my parents’ house, and every other bill which still needed to be paid.  At the very least Houston, the city where this took place, has some of the finest hospitals in the world, and so I didn’t have to travel to a different city for treatment.  As this letter indicates, while Canada’s healthcare may be “free,” you might have to spend a hell of a lot of money to be able to receive it.

Boobies for Capitalism

Remember, according to Michael Moore everyone in Canada gets all the super awesome healthcare they could ever possibly want or need.

Toronto is set to become a Canadian centre for breast reconstructive surgery thanks in part to a high-profile boost from politician and breast cancer survivor Belinda Stronach.

Stronach said today she has raised $1 million to establish an academic chair at the Toronto General and Western Hospital Foundation, to ensure that state-of-the-art techniques are available to Canadian women.

She also committed to raising an additional $1 million for the initiative with the hopes of making Toronto a world leader for breast reconstruction.

Stronach was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery in the U.S. earlier this year. [Emphasis added]

Fascinating, isn’t it, that Stronach would leave the healthcare utopia of Canada to seek care in the evil, greedy, heartless, for-profit United States? 

Health and Capitalism in Communist China

As many of you may know, I recently moved from California to Beijing, China.  Today I had my tour of two of Beijing’s western medical facilities.  The first was the United Family Hospital and Clinic.  Their website is here, so take a look through it and see for yourself.  I was met by the Marketing Operations Manager (note the word “market") who gave me a guided tour of the entire facility.  A few brief points:

• This hospital was as professional-looking as just about any US hospital I have ever been in.
• All the rooms are private.  They have regular rooms, which are nicer than most US hospital rooms, and they have VIP rooms, which were nicer than the hotel room I stayed in for the two weeks before I found my apartment.
• All the rooms had en suite bathrooms, and the couches all converted to beds in case family members wished to stay in the room with the patient.
• They are a full-service hospital.  They have a neonatal intensive care unit, MRI scanners, anything you could ever need. 
• They have a full pharmacy.  I had brought along the medications that I take to treat my OCD.  I spoke to their head pharmacist, who looked at the bottles and stated that they had every one of these drugs.  Some of the dosages the pills came in were different than the US, but getting the correct dosage wasn’t a problem, I’d just have to take two or four pills instead of one. 
• I saw one of their maternity rooms.  Everything, from labor through to the birth and follow-up care, is done in this room.  Right down the hall is a surgical room in case a c-section is necessary.

Now, allow me to introduce a couple of the doctors.  First there’s Dr. Chickering.

Complexity

The best political magazine in the world, Reason, has an interview with documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman.  You’ve probably never heard of him, so here’s the introduction to the piece.

It has been 40 years since the premiere of Titicut Follies, a bleak and scathing documentary about an asylum for the criminally insane. The audience at that first screening saw a cascade of disturbing images of mistreatment and neglect, most notoriously a brutal force-feeding of a naked inmate. As the prisoner is fed through the nose, a guard tells him to “chew your food”; the tube itself is lubricated with grease, and a doctor dangles a burning cigarette over the funnel.

But the most grotesque detail may be the follies of the title: an annual musical revue put on by the prisoners and guards. The revue frames the film, which begins with a row of madmen with pompoms singing “Strike Up the Band” and ends with the cast crooning “So Long for Now.” It’s a strange and darkly comic performance, part Ziegfeld and part Bedlam.

The movie was both a landmark piece of journalism and a landmark work of art. It made the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater one of the most infamous madhouses in the country, and it is now one of the most celebrated documentaries of the ’60s. It is also notable for two reasons that have nothing to do with its merits. It was the first picture to be directed by Frederick Wiseman, a former law professor who at age 37 was beginning a long series of rich and challenging films. And it is the only movie in U.S. history to be banned for reasons other than obscenity or national security.

Inevitably the subject of Tubby Riefenstahl rears its head.

Reason: There’s a recent trend toward documentaries in which the filmmaker makes himself a part of the action. Obviously that’s very different from your style. Sicko and Hospital are both about American health care, but their approaches are just poles apart.

Wiseman: Well, I haven’t seen Sicko, but generally speaking I’m not a fan of Michael Moore’s.

Reason: How come?

Wiseman: I think he’s an entertainer. I don’t think he’s interested in complexity.

I’m not against the filmmaker appearing in a film. I think some of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen have been made by a filmmaker who’s present in the film. I don’t know if you’ve seen any movies by Marcel Ophuls—The Sorrow and the Pity or Hotel Terminus. Ophuls is a great filmmaker because he’s a great interviewer and he has a very sharp and analytical mind. In the case of Michael Moore, I don’t see any particular filmmaking skills, and I think his point of view is extremely simplistic and self-serving.

One of my goals is always to deal with the ambiguity and complexity that I find in any subject. Even the simplest human act can be subject to multiple interpretations or have multiple causes. In Titicut Follies, for example, there are scenes where you see a guard or a doctor or a social worker being cruel to an inmate. But there are other situations where they’re being kind. Some of them are both kind and cruel, if not simultaneously then serially.

“He’s not interested in complexity.” That’s about the most accurate critique of Moore I’ve ever read.  It’s a point Jim and I have made here a thousand times. 

Sicko has NOTHING to do with healthcare.  Absolutely nothing.  Sicko is a two hour informercial for socialism, and healthcare is merely the context in which that infomercial is presented.  The issue of universal healthcare is unquestionably one of the most complex facing human society today.  As the baby boomer generation ages, where are we going to get the money and resources to provide unlimited free healthcare?  Is it fair to saddle the current generation with a massive mountain of debt to do so?  Is single-payer government-run healthcare the best or most efficient means of providing universal healthcare?  Should we even have universal healthcare?

The questions are endless, as are the possible solutions.  Note that NOTHING in Sicko would ever lead the viewer to question whether socialism is the solution.  The reason for this is simple:  the movie exists to justify Moore’s socialist political beliefs, not to lead a debate on finding solutions to the questions that face us.  Socialism is presented without critique, Santa Clause and government all rolled up in a sugar-coated ball of dreams, while any solution involving competition or the market is shown as hateful, evil, greedy, heartless, and so on.  It’s an either/or solution, two sides of the same coin.  Capitalism evil, socialism perfect.  America evil, Europe perfect.  And the Cuba segment speaks for itself.

For the record, once again let me state the obvious.  Both Jim and I believe (a) that universal healthcare is possible, (b) that the American system is a complete disaster, (c) that the socialist model Moore glamorizes is just as bad, if not worse, and (d) that we as a society need to have the courage to look for different, novel solutions.  Moore has no interest in actually solving the problem, he wants the problem solved using the socialist system he has clearly believed in since he was a teenager. 

Think of the issue of race in America.  Two people who benefit the most from race relations are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Do any of you out there honestly think that either of these men want to see the end of racism in America?  Of course they don’t, because if there were no racism then there would be no need for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  So they foment that which they claim to oppose because it is the source of their power.  This is the exact situation with Moore.  He needs sick people, because he needs a reason to justify socialism.  There is no problem for which socialism isn’t the solution. Socialism is perfect.

Don’t you think that someone tackling an issue as complex as universal healthcare should have an interest in complexity?

A pattern emerges

Michael Moore’s Sicko came out on DVD this week, and let me tell you, my inbox has been like a minefield of stupid.  It’s amazing how little people think for themselves these days, or are willing to look up the simplest of details.

Let’s do an exercise.  Let’s say there was this film. 

Not all Brits are happy with “Sicko”

"Sicko” recently had its grand opening in England, and I was expecting it to receive quite a fanfare. It seems, however, that a fair number of reviewers are only loving the first half of the movie… y’know, the part where Moore slams the American system. It’s when Moore shines his happy rose-colored light on the British system of health care that has many reviewers all riled up.

The review from the Scotsman starts off with a bang, furiously agreeing with an indicting the American health care system:

FORGET about Kurt Russell’s character in Death Proof, Michael Moore should rename himself Stuntman Mike. With his latest film, Sicko, America’s premiere left-wing polemicist solidifies his reputation as a consummate showman, pulling off some outlandish tricks and making damn sure he leaves us entertained. He may not put his life on the line, but in this examination of America’s healthcare system, he does do what no-one else has dared do on such a broad public platform: he stands up and asks why the wealthiest country in the world doesn’t have a system that provides basic care for the sick of any age, race, class or income level.

It’s a principle that’s so fundamentally sound that it’s impossible rationally to argue against it. Yet a lot of people in America do. The profit-hungry drug companies with their outlandish product mark-ups; the bureaucratic Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) responsible for so many insurance policies that fail the patients; the politicians dependent on campaign contributions from the industry - these are just a few of the key players who collectively have a stake in ensuring that the health of the nation doesn’t improve.

But, just as quickly, the review turns when it begins to discuss the second half of the film:

It’s too bad, then, that Moore undermines his own efforts with his excursions abroad to superficially compare and contrast the health systems of other nations with the US. With faux naïvete and specs heavily tinted with rose, he travels to Canada, France, the UK and Cuba to marvel at the utopian dream we’re all living courtesy of our super-duper free health service, which apparently costs us absolutely nothing, is run with clockwork efficiency, has no waiting lists and pays all its cheerful, definitely not-overworked doctors enough to have a flash car and a nice £500,000 home in the middle of London. It’s a land where MRSA doesn’t exist and where “who gets what treatment when” isn’t determined by inefficient hospital trusts that squander millions.

Sure, nobody could seriously want to trade the NHS for an American-style system (Tony Benn says in the film if that happened “there’d be revolution"), but it’s not helpful to suggest to US audiences that it costs nothing and works perfectly. More to the point, you may find yourself slightly peeved that your National Insurance contributions are also providing free emergency treatment for idiotic American Beatles’ fans who throw their back out while doing handstands on the Abbey Road zebra crossing.

The story Moore is telling is powerful and humanistic enough without such embarrassing deviations. If only the compassion he demonstrates for his fellow Americans was matched by an appreciation for their ability to grasp complex issues without all the parlour tricks, he might be on to something.

This article in The Telegraph also takes issue with Moore’s portrait of the British health care system, which it claims it is a state of complete calamity:

This weekend, the film Sicko — an indictment of US healthcare by the American polemicist Michael Moore — opens across Britain. In it, Mr Moore depicts our NHS somewhat simplistically as a haven of kindly efficiency. While his view is a reminder that there is much to be admired in the NHS, particularly by foreigners, it ignores the harsh fact that it is an organisation heavily funded by British taxpayers and frequently failing to provide proper care in return. Too often, wards are going uncleaned, and patients are neglected in the essential basics of washing and feeding. When a nurse of the stature of Justine Whitaker from Lancashire, named Nurse of the Year for her work in cancer care, resigns in despair because the constant burden of form-filling means that some days she doesn’t get to see a single patient, it is evidence of a system in serious trouble… Time and again, Government ministers have promised the public cleaner wards and greater one-to-one care, only to be rocked by yet more scandals. This is not simply a result of demand outstripping natural capability, but of systematic flaws in the operation of the NHS, compounded by fresh blunders. The money in the NHS is often squandered on lunatic Government initiatives, such as the botched rejigging of the junior doctors’ job application procedure, or the terrifyingly incompetent new contract for GPs that has now resulted in an average GP salary of £120,000 a year while permitting 90 per cent of GPs to opt out of providing care at evenings and weekends. These are disasters imposed from the top down, and paid for dearly from the bottom up. It is time that the Government did what it so often promises and so often fails to do, and really put the patient first.

So here’s my question of the day. If the British can clearly see that Moore’s depiction of their own health care system is biased, based on poor data and research and completely misleading… why can they not seem to grasp that Moore’s depiction of the US system might also be biased, based on poor data and research and completely misleading? How can anyone honestly think that Moore could get one half of his movie completely right and the other half completely wrong? How is it not apparent to these viewers and reviewers that if part of something is a deception that the rest of the the thing must also be construed as possibly being deceptive as well?

It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? 

Cuba for the non-tourist tourist

This is a must-read if you have any doubt about how bad it is in Cuba for the average Cuban.  Moore’s rose-colored camera lens in Sicko told you a flat-out lie.

The money quote, IMHO:

“We learned that the Cuban system is nothing but misery, moral mendacity and abuse. The system simply smothers you. And yet this revolution (with it"s Che Guevara banners) has sold itself to the youth of the world as a paradigm of equality, liberty and national liberation. And the leaders of the government that governs my country (Spain) simply refuse to come out and call this place a dictatorship. The Cuban people’s personal aspirations seemed completely mutilated. I"ve never felt such anguish about a nation and a people in my life. if I were a Cuban I"d certainly be on a raft.”

Read the whole thing.  It’s worth your time.

P.S. - If you’re not reading Babalu Blog regularly, you should be.

Capitalism is the Solution

The vast majority of the hate mail we receive from the Moore worshippers are people from Europe who have been fooled by their idol into believing that the only option to the current disastrous US healthcare system is the European socialist model.  This is, of course, completely untrue.  Everyone knows that the old system of employer-provided insurance, in place wince WWII, does not work in today’s world and needs to be ended.  The question is, do we replace it with the socialist model, which is clearly just as bad in many respects and vastly worse in others?  The following article from Reason explains how we can end the ridiculous system we have now without adopting the socialist welfare disaster of Europe and Canada.

Unfortunately, the CED proposals go quickly off the rails when the group recommends that every household receive a fixed-dollar credit sufficient to purchase an approved low-priced quality health plan. This health insurance credit would not be means tested and would be financed by some kind of broadly based tax—perhaps a payroll, value-added or environmental tax. Such taxes, like Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, are likely to be regressive, which means the poor will pay a larger percentage of their incomes than the rich. In fact, two-thirds of taxpayers paid more in social security and Medicare taxes than they did income taxes.

For example, today every wage-earning American pays a Medicare payroll tax of 2.9 percent. That tax is supposedly divided so that employees and employers each pay 1.45 percent. Of course, employers would give employees the other 1.45 percent if they were not paying the tax, so in reality the employees are paying the whole tax. The same thing goes for the Social Security Ponzi scheme.

The CED proposal is chiefly a ploy to get employers out from under the increasingly heavy burden of buying insurance for their employees. That’s a laudatory goal, but it shouldn’t be done by imposing yet another tax on employees. The good part of the CED proposal is that employees would purchase private health insurance in a competitive market. If households could find a policy for cheaper than the credit, they could pocket the extra money for themselves. The CED argues persuasively that this kind of competition would tend to keep health care costs down.

But why advocate a tax to pay for the credits? One advantage of such a health insurance credit is that it would avoid the administrative and enforcement costs of coercing people to buy insurance. Such enforcement has proved problematic in other insurance markets. For example, although auto insurance is mandatory, more than 14 percent of motorists are uninsured.

However, there is a better way to expand private health insurance and to obtain the benefits of competition as a way to keep medical spending down. First, retain the CED proposal that health insurance be mandatory. But, instead of a new tax, allow employers to hand over the money they currently spend on health insurance to their employees in the form of money wages. Then, in order to create a level playing field, expand the current tax exemption for employer-purchased health benefits to all individuals. Maintaining the tax exemption helps enforce the mandate because taxpayers will have to report annually how much they paid for their health insurance when they pay their taxes.

What about the poor Americans who do not make enough to afford medical insurance? Give them vouchers to buy private medical insurance and pay for the vouchers by abolishing Medicaid. In 2005, the Federal government and the states spent $316 billion on Medicaid to cover around 17 million households. That works out to about $18,500 per household per year. The annual premium for family coverage in 2007 averaged just over $12,000. Due to increased competition, average premiums for the minimum private plans will drop. This means that some money should be left over from Medicare to pay for the currently uninsured poor. There will be some administrative costs involved with determining voucher eligibility, but the health insurance vouchers themselves would essentially be self-enforcing. The experience of Switzerland, in which nearly one-third of the population receives subsidies to purchase private insurance, suggests that very few would fall through the new health insurance safety net.

God bless the free market.

The truth about Cuban health care exposed on Hannity & Colmes - UPDATED

On October 10th, Hannity & Colmes ran an amazing piece about the REAL health care that REAL Cubans receive in their own country. It is a disturbing video that shows the real life hospital conditions that average Cubans must endure in order to obtain even the most basic health care. For the first time on American television the ugliness, despair, and abject poverty of the Cuban health care system has been shown for what it truly is. It is a direct rebuttal to everything that Michael Moore portrayed in “Sicko” and further validates the arguments I made against him in my articles about the Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas, in particular my summation to the series in Part 4. Watch it and see the truth about real Cuban health care for yourself:

If that isn’t disturbing enough for you, there’s more. Cuban Truth has quite a few additional videos that fully demonstrate the horror of living under the thumb of Castro and the abject horrors of Cuban health care. These videos are quite disturbing, so please be warned if you follow that link and choose to view them.

After watching this piece that Hannity & Colmes ran I have only one thing to say. Michael Moore, you have purposely deceived the world with your portrayal of Cuba in “Sicko”. You have turned your back on the suffering of the Cuban people in order to further your own personal agenda without a thought of what damage your actions might have on a nation of desperate and impoverished people. And, worst of all, you have collaborated with Castro and his regime in order to do it. You have proven yourself to be a liar and a collaberator and I hope that now America can see you for what you truly are. Shame on you, Michael Moore. Eternal shame on you for what you have tried to do to the people of Cuba.

I would like to give a hat tip to Val Prieto and Babalu Blog for letting us here at Moorewatch know about this broadcast. I would also like to personally thank Mr. Prieto and everyone at Babalu for the outstanding work they have done and continue to do to expose the truth about Cuba and for doing everything they can to aid the Cuban cause. Mr. Prieto, I salute you, sir.

UPDATE: Val Prieto has put up the second part of the Hannity & Colmes piece on Babalu Blog along with some commentary. Here is the second half of the Hannity & Colmes piece:

Thank you once again to Val Prieto and Babalu Blog for their amazing work and commitment to the freedom of Cuba. :)

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Mikey on Oprah again

Well, I didn’t get to see it.  My Tivo, or rather the Comcast cable that feeds it, blacked out the channel it was recording on.  I assume some weird syndication rule kicked in.  I didn’t find out until last night when we sat down to watch his sales pitch for Super Special Free Magical Health Perfection For All Run By The Same Government That Can’t Get Anything Else Right But Will Somehow Magically Do This One Overwhelmingly Massive Thing Absolutely Right.

Damn, that is an unwieldy name.

Anyway, if you saw it, please comment...or feel free to write up a post-length entry and I’ll post it for you.

Ah, That Island Paradise

I was innocently basking in the wonderful sight of Cuba’s UN delegation flouncing out of the room because Bush said some mean wotten things about Pappa Fidel, when Reason brings this nonsense to my attention. It’s a long scientific paper (and behind a firewall in any case) but the abstract is something that will make Michael Moore drool. We’ll be sure to see him crowing about this soon.

Cuba’s economic crisis of 1989–2000…

Whoa whoa whoa! Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Economic crisis of 1989-2000? An eleven year economic crisis?! That’s impossible on the Island Paradise. Note the year it started. 1989. The year communism fell and Fidel stopping getting handouts from the Commies. So, in a very real sense, they have been in an economic crisis since 1959.

Anyway, resuming our discussion:

Cuba’s economic crisis of 1989–2000 resulted in reduced energy intake, increased physical activity, and sustained population-wide weight loss.

Most people call that “starvation”, but I’ll let them stick to the technical terms.

The crisis reduced per capita daily energy intake from 2,899 calories to 1,863 calories. During the crisis period, the proportion of physically active adults increased from 30% to 67%, and a 1.5-unit shift in the body mass index distribution was observed, along with a change in the distribution of body mass index categories. The prevalence of obesity declined from 14% to 7%, the prevalence of overweight increased 1%, and the prevalence of normal weight increased 4%.

Add the numbers to see what they’ve left out—the population of underweight people increased at least 2%. As a commenter at Reason pointed out, the Jews lost a lot of weight during the Holocaust, too. I would add that so did the Ukranians during Stalin, the Irish during the Potato Famine, Africans during various civil wars, Cambodians under Pol Pot and . . . Christ, I can’t go on with this. You get the idea.

During 1997–2002, there were declines in deaths attributed to diabetes (51%), coronary heart disease (35%), stroke (20%), and all causes (18%).

Of course, we always believe numbers that come out of Communist countries. Like the way the Soviets used to claim they had suburbs. Granted, some of those suburbs consisted of log cabins and mud huts, but ... they were suburbs! Those people were below the urb. In many cases, six feet below it.

Not reported? How much of an increase there was in death by suicide and starvation. Note carefully that the overall death rate dropped less than the death rate from stroke, heart disease and cancer - so something must have increased. For most people, you’ve got to live a while before you get a stroke, heart disease or cancer. I have no doubt that the millions of Africans murdered during the Congo War had decreased rates of stroke, heart disease and cancer as well.

An outbreak of neuropathy and a modest increase in the all-cause death rate among the elderly were also observed.

Hmm. So just one decade of this back-breaking-labor-and-starvation plan has already shorted and worsened the lives of Cuba’s seniors. That’s nice.

These results suggest that population-wide measures designed to reduce energy stores, without affecting nutritional sufficiency [!!], may lead to declines in diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevalence and mortality.

So there you have it. Michael Moore was right. Cuba has pointed the way! All we need to do is reduce ourselves to such abject total poverty that our 15-year-old daughters are prostitutes. We need to all quit our computer jobs and go to manual labor (all except Mikey of course. Every Golgafrinchan paradise needs documentary film makers). We need to all get the food literally ripped out of our hands ... and we’ll all be healthier!

I think Michael, for opening the discussion of how wonderful Cuba’s healthcare system is, deserves, at minimum, a Nobel Prize. I’ll see if they have a category for fatuous self-importance.

I’m going to go off on a tangent here, but one I think is critical to how we think about socialized medicine. If we get MikeyMooreCare, forced diets will be coming, one way or another.

Doctors Behind Bars

There’s one place in America where people are given 100% medical care provided by the state.  Every single medical need they have is provided, free of charge.  So I think it’s reasonable that we look at this system to provide some insight into what government-run healthcare in America would look like.  What is this system I refer to?  Why, the prison system, of course

Now, before we begin, let us not forget that this is a point Moore has made himself a number of times.  He made a huge deal after the capture of Saddam that the dictator was getting the type of free medical exam that American citizens couldn’t get, and in Sicko he took 9/11 victims to Gitmo to try to get the same level of care that the terror suspects held there were receiving.  So before you Mooreons attack me for an unfair comparison, remember that your lord and savior has been making this point for years.

As many as one in six deaths of California prison inmates last year might have been preventable, according to a study of medical care in 32 state lockups that will be used to help rebuild the troubled system.

One inmate, who reported extreme chest pains in the middle of the night, died of a heart ailment after waiting eight hours to see a doctor.

Another who complained for days of severe abdominal pain died of acute pancreatitis after medical staff did not believe his pleas were credible.

A third died after a two-year delay in diagnosis of his testicular cancer.

And an asthma patient died after failing to receive steroid medication for two days following transfer from a county jail.

The report, released Wednesday by the court-appointed receiver in charge of healthcare for the state’s 173,000 prisoners, revealed a broad pattern of delays in diagnosis, poor inmate access to doctors and tests, botched handling of medical records, and failure of medical staff to recognize and treat dangerous conditions.

Officials said some lapses led to disciplinary actions against doctors and nurses.

There were 426 deaths in 2006, including 43 suicides, and the study examined 381 of them.

Eighteen deaths were found to be preventable, meaning better medical management or a better system of care would have prevented deaths. An additional 48 were found to be “possibly preventable,” meaning better medical management of a system of care might have prevented death.

Of the deaths considered preventable, six were from asthma, which receiver Robert Sillen said he intended to make a priority for reforms.

“The leading cause of [preventable] death being asthma is unconscionable, and it is evidence of systemic problems and problems with individual clinical judgments,” Sillen said in an interview. “Adults in 21st century California should not have asthma as a primary cause of death.”

Now, be honest.  This could very easily be a report about the Canadian or British healthcare systems.  You could swap “NHS” for “prison” and end up with damn near a verbatim report.  If your goal is to provide 100% coverage to everyone then socialized medicine is for you.  If your goal is to provide the best quality coverage to the maximum number of people, we can all see just how wonderful the government is at providing 100% healthcare.

The Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky is alleged to have said, “The way society treats its prisoners characterizes the level of its civilization.” I will leave it to the reader to determine to what degree proponents of 100% government-run healthcare are interested in a just and fair civilization.

Update by Lee: From a commenter at my main blog.

Red Herrings

If you haven’t seen the 20/20 clip of John Stossel’s partial interview with Moore, take a moment and watch.  Stossel keeps asking him questions relating to Cuba.  Stossel shows that the data about Cuban life expectancy (and indeed, anything about Cuba) come straight from Castro’s propaganda factories.  He then asks Moore why we should trust what Cuba has to say, which is a completely legitimate point.  My quick transcript of the exchange follows.

STOSSEL:  Why believe what they say about how long they live?

MOORE:  Not to direct your interview here, but you know Cuba’s a red herring.  Let’s stick to Canada and Britain and this stuff because I think these are legitimate arguments that are made against the film and against the so-called idea of socialized medicine and I think you should challenge me on these things and I’ll give you my answer.

STOSSEL:  (Voiceover) So, next week, that’s what we’ll do.

Now, as Jim rightly asks below, if Cuba is a “red herring” then why does Moore feature it so prominently in his film?  I didn’t really get what point Moore was trying to make with the red herring remark.  It was only tonight, when watching this 60 Minutes report about the dust at Ground Zero that I figured it out.

Moore, despite his obvious love for and undying devotion to Fidel Castro and his regime, knows that Cuba is a despicable place.  Moore doesn’t want Stossel mentioning healthcare in the context of Cuba because Moore thinks that by focusing on Cuba the audience will be manipulated into dismissing the idea of socialized medicine by tying it to Fidel Castro.  In other words, don’t use the viewer’s predisposition to be opposed to Castro to attack socialized medicine.  Talk about Britain and Canada rather than Cuba, since Cuba carries a built-in negative emotional response, and Moore wants to debate socialized medicine on its own merits.

In and of itself I think that’s a completely fair point.

Tonight, though, watching the 60 Minutes piece, it dawned on me that this is exactly what Moore did when he took the 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba.  After all, according to Moore our country is littered with the corpses of people who died in the streets while evil healthcare corporations reaped massive profits.  Surely he could have taken a far more random sampling of people to Cuba with him.  Why did he take a boatload of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba?

Simple.  9/11 rescue workers come with an extremely powerful sympathetic response built in.  We all saw them risking life and limb on that pile of rubble, showing the world the best of America.  Moore wanted the audience to form a bond with his passengers, so he chose 9/11 workers.  When a brewery wants to sell beer they show guys at parties with gorgeous women.  The implied message is that if you drink this beer, women who look like this will want to sleep with you.  It’s associating two disparate items and allowing the viewer to generate the connection in their mind.  In Moore’s case, 9/11 workers were “turned away” by the evil corporate system, but they were taken care of by Cuba.  What does 9/11 have to do with Cuba’s healthcare system?  Nothing at all, but the implied message is clear:  Cuba’s socialist government will treat 9/11 heroes better than our evil free market system.

Moore could have just as easily chosen a convenience store worker from Ohio who has been denied foot surgery for two years and has to stand 8 hours a day in pain, but he didn’t.  He carefully selected the one group of people toward whom, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, you will immediately feel sympathy.  Moore wanted to use that sympathy to promote socialized medicine.  But when Stossel did exactly the same thing by using Cuba’s negative image to attack socialized medicine, all of a sudden it’s a “red herring” and not germane to the discussion.

See how this works?  See how skillfully Moore can manipulate his audience?  If he had taken a boat full of ex-cons who were being denied healthcare, small time crooks who had paid their debt to society, would you feel the same emotional pull that you do towards 9/11 workers?  Of course not.  Moore knows this, which is why he chose his passengers from a very select group, even though any group of uninsured sick people would make exactly the same point.

Moore is a master manipulator.  When he noticed Stossel tying Cuba’s healthcare system to Cuba’s government—a completely legitimate point—he tried to divert the discussion away from the undeniable truth about his idol El Presidente and the misery of life under socialism.  In his film Moore paints the healthcare debate as the evil and heartlessness of capitalism versus the purity and goodness of socialism.  Not one time does he concede that there are some things our system does much better than theirs.  It was an entirely emotional argument.  When he does Stossel’s interview, however, he wants to direct it so that it is framed solely as a healthcare debate on the merits, devoid of emotion.

As I have said on this blog before, Moore had an excellent opportunity to create a film that showed the positives and negatives of socialized and private systems, then suggest ways in which we could improve our system by incorporating some aspects of the systems in other countries.  He had the chance for his debate solely on the merits, free of red herrings.  Instead he decided to create an infomercial for socialism. 

Emotional manipulation is Moore’s stock in trade, and he’s sure as hell not going to let some reporter tread on his territory.

The British Example

Let us not forget that not only does Michael Moore advocate emulating Britain’s disaster of a healthcare system, he’s also in favor of their gun control policies, which are equally successful.

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

Okay, okay, so they live in a police state where the government videotapes everything that citizens do.  And not only aren’t they able to own firearms, there is no legitimate legal right to self-defense in the UK.  And they have higher rates of crime than we do.

But their healthcare is FREE!  (Even though you might have to wait a year or so to get it.)

John Stossel gets at Mikey on 20/20

Wow.  Moore is....delusional.  He’s a terrible actor, we all saw Canadian Bacon.  He actually believes that regular Cubans get that exact level of health care, regardless of the thousands of Cuban-Americans that tell the world otherwise, regardless of the fact that there are mountains of evidence that he’s wrong.  Weirder than that, though, is this: “Cuba’s the red herring.  Let’s stick to Canada and Britain and this stuff...” What the hell?  Why is it so heavily featured in his movie if it doesn’t matter?

Can any Moore fan explain that crazy shit?

I Hate to Say We Told You So, But…

Guess what?  As if the food nazis in America weren’t bad enough, now the UK is considering denying medical care to people who lead unhealthy lifestyles.

Failing to follow a healthy lifestyle could lead to free NHS treatment being denied under the Tory plans.

Patients would be handed “NHS Health Miles Cards” allowing them to earn reward points for losing weight, giving up smoking, receiving immunisations or attending regular health screenings.

Like a supermarket loyalty card, the points could be redeemed as discounts on gym membership and fresh fruit and vegetables, or even give priority for other public services - such as jumping the queue for council housing.

But heavy smokers, the obese and binge drinkers who were a drain on the NHS could be denied some routine treatments such as hip replacements until they cleaned up their act.

I wonder what that fat bastard Michael Moore thinks of this wonderful idea.  Of course, he’s a multi-millionaire, so he’ll be able to live the lifestyle that he wants, while the people will be subject to the government’s draconian health guidelines.  But the kicker of the article for me was this.

The report calls for a greater emphasis on the “citizen’s responsibility” to be healthy and says no one should expect taxpayers to fund their unhealthy lifestyles.

YES!  YES!  This is EXACTLY why we are opposed to socialized medicine!  One citizen should not be forced to subsidize the unhealthy lifestyle of another citizen.  And the best way to make that happen is through private insurance.  Why?  Because you are more likely to go to a doctor if you have a sniffle when going to the doctor is free.  If you have to pay to see the doctor, you might deem than sniffle nothing to worry about.  I remember reading a story a few years back about elderly patients in the UK going to see their local doctors not because they were sick but just because they were lonely old people and they liked the attention.  To combat this scourge of the elderly they instituted a tiny copay, something like one or two pounds, just to discourage this type of wasteful misuse of the healthcare system.

And any moves to impose compulsory cards on patients would provoke a backlash from civil liberties groups.

In a country with CCTV cameras every 10 inches, videotaping everything that every citizen ever does, I think that the UK pissed away the idea of civil liberties a long time ago.

The Dorrell report also calls for a consultation on raising the smoking age to 18 and for shops to be stripped of their licences if they sell tobacco and alcohol to minors.

Why even let people smoke?  Just ban smoking and alcohol sales.  Ban the sale of any unhealthy food.  The nanny state knows what is best for you.  And why shouldn’t it?  Nanny is paying for your healthcare, so nanny will tell you what to do.  Now, run along and be a good little sheep, knowing that nanny always has your best interests at heart.

Slouching Towards Cuba

Here’s how freedom dies—one good intention at a time.  Congress is currently about to increase the SCHIP program, which is “supposed to provide health insurance for children whose families make too much money to qualify for medical welfare, i.e., Medicaid, but who can’t afford to pay for private health insurance. Initially, this meant families whose annual incomes were twice the poverty level. This amounts to a $40,000 income for a family of four in 2007.” Okay fine, it helps people get private insurance.  What’s the problem?

If President George W. Bush fails to keep his promise to veto this legislation, SCHIP would be well on the way to becoming another middle class entitlement. That is just what advocates of government-funded health care want. Rep. Steven Rothman (D-NJ) made this goal explicit when he called the House SCHIP bill “the next step toward universal health care for all Americans.” Expanding SCHIP is what Kathleen Stoll, director of health care policy at the left-leaning lobby group, Families USA, happily identified as sneaky sequentialism. The ambit of private health insurance and health care will shrink as government funding expands.

In fact, this kind of crowding out is already taking place. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report in May that found, “For every 100 children who gain coverage as a result of SCHIP, there is a corresponding reduction in private coverage of between 25 and 50 children.” In January, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber and Cornell University economist Kosali Simon published a study that estimated “for every 100 children who are enrolled in public insurance, 60 children lose private insurance.” And why not? From the point of view of parents, the government is giving their kids free health insurance, so they can pocket the money they were otherwise spending on private insurance.

The CBO also noted that a broadening of SCHIP to higher income levels “would probably involve greater crowd-out of private coverage than has occurred to date because such children have greater access to private insurance.” Recall that 90 percent of kids living in families with incomes between 200 and 300 percent of the poverty level are insured and 95 percent of those in families with incomes over 400 percent are. Crowding out of private insurance helps force the country to take “next step” toward universal government-controlled health care. After all, almost 50 percent of medical expenditures are already paid for by government programs. Advocates of universal health insurance hope that as fewer and fewer Americans rely on private health insurance, government-funded health insurance will grow in political acceptance.

Therein lies the problem.  Even in countries with universal coverage, there are almost always options for private insurance.  In Canada they are in the midst of legal disputes over this very issue.  If socialized medicine were able to meet anything other than the bare minimum of service there would be no need for private insurance in the first place.  So the existence of private insurance in nations with socialized insurance is prima facie proof that private medical care is superior to socialized care.

Over the last 40 years or so, ever since LBJ’s “Great Society,” suckling at the welfare teat has gone from a tool in the war against poverty to an “entitlement” that guarantees people stay mired in poverty.  The same will happen with healthcare.  The more acceptable socialized medicine is, the more likely society will begin to view healthcare as the government’s job, something “they” do.  As reliance on socialized medicine increases the quality inevitably decreases. 

And thus we slouch towards Cuba, in the hopes that the 5¢ medicine will be waiting for us at the end of the rainbow.