Health care limits our choices

Wow. All across the country "health care panels" have swooped down on agencies that administer care, and told them they can't use such and so drug or treatment because it's "too expensive".

The quality of care is going to go down, plain and simple. That is the main reason so many of us oppose the imposition of a national health care bill. If you were stupid enough to buy into the "everyone has to have health insurance" baloney thirty years ago, you were part of a movement to give control of your medical decisions over to someone who wasn't either you or your doctor, in the name of getting something for free, or so you thought. Your health insurance didn't come out of your pocket, but your employer certainly had to figure into your salary the money he was paying as your "salary plus benefits". You thought it was free so you loved it.

What you didn't see, and probably never even thought about, was that instead of your expenses being between you and your doctor and the fee he needed to live on and the supplies he (or you) had to buy to administer any treatment, your money was going to pay for twenty unrelated people and their bosses and their stockholders to handle your paperwork and push the money around from desk to desk before it ever got to your doctor, and thus the price of health insurance (and thus the perceived price of heath care) soared. Yes, soared. It wasn't just the MRIs and ultrasounds and trial lawyers and hospitals billing ten dollars for an aspirin. You personally, and all the other people rushing to jump onto the health insurance bandwagon, were inflating our medical care horribly.

So in about twenty years' time we went from a nation who spent like $300 a year (for a family of four) for annual doctors' visits and the occasional "Doctor, Johnny has a cold, can you stop by on your way home?" to "Your family's premiums are going to cost six thousand dollars a year." Yet we were still getting the three hundred dollar a year treatment.

Then, in the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton needed a meme to remind Americans that we need democrats to "fix" our lives and campaigned on "ohhhhh, cry cry, so many millions of people in this country need health insurance." From there the demand for universal health care soared, since people had completely lost sight of the fact it's coming out of our damn pockets, and started believing what children believe, that everything that's "given" to them was free.

But that takes me back to better schools and a better-educated public. So I'll stop here.