So Mr. Grooms complains (Boomer With Attitude: “Badly needed repairs,” Jan. 24) that the United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn’t treat healthcare as a “right”? Well, as tenuous as our constitutional rights have become, and as socialized as our healthcare system already is, what he complains about I consider a glimmer of hope.
To advocate socialized healthcare fails on two grounds: moral and economic. Its moral failure can be seen by comparing “a right to healthcare” to real rights, such as speech or religion. Such rights only protect my right to speak and act according to my own conscience; they impose nothing on others, except to refrain from using force to intervene. In contrast, false rights advocated by socialists require that others not only permit my actions, but actually fund them. In other words, advocating a “right to healthcare” is actually advocating the right to enslave.
Economically, the fatal flaw of socialized healthcare is its fantasy that the law of supply and demand can be ignored. To create an unlimited supply of healthcare requires an unlimited price, a burden that no class of taxpayers can sustain. As a result, socialized healthcare systems always turn to rationing. Does Mr. Grooms really want some bureaucrat to tell us that Granny must die because her cardiac needs are too low in priority? Or perhaps he will like this scenario: Your father has a tumor that will kill him within six months, so we will schedule him for surgery two years from Friday. Both situations happen under the Canadian and other nationalized healthcare services. And perhaps he should talk to a few veterans about their VA healthcare.
— Christopher Cole, Huntersville
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2007.
As usual Mr. Cole brings his A game.
Thank You.
Perhaps the most rational argument I’ve heard against socialized health care and it still fails to convince me.
In a wealthy society such as ours, especially one in which the distribution of wealth is so uneven such as to leave so many too poor to insure their own healthcare, I declare that there is no reason to expect that any citizen shouldn’t be able to anticipate basic health care, if not (by your argument) the ‘natural right’ to live another day and ward off disease, then the expectation that this basic need can be met. As a civilized, wealthy, and empathetic society, we can make the decision to ensure at least this much can be expected by all our citizens.
In a world where the poor can be heartlessly ignored and left to suffer and die, it’s no wonder if apathy and crime should run rampant, and how is that good for society?
The reference to Canadian healthcare struck me off-kilter, since in my experience I’ve only ever heard tirades of virulent complaints about US health care from Canadians who have moved to America and had to deal with our healthcare system. Or at least a yearning nostalgia for the Canadian way. Like this guy, for example.
While Mr. Grooms’ viewpoints are even a little left of mine, he was right-on with his article about universal healthcare. And of course you could set your watch by some right-wing ideologue coming along and repeating the myth of “universal healthcare = bad”.
Your points, Mr. Cole, only prove one thing; that you are not part of the almost 50 million Americans that are uninsured, but you’re part of the 250 million that ARE insured, some of which are simply greedy. So you concoct a story about how Canadian patients have to die “waiting their turn” for rationed health care. Would it make you feel better if the aforementioned Granny didn’t have to wait her turn, but just couldn’t afford the treatment? Or perhaps you should ask Dana Christianson which system is better? Her story appeared on PBS’s “Now” last May. She bought a cancer policy for her husband, and even though she had kept up with premiums, the insurance company stopped paying for her husband’s medical bills.
Oh, and by the way…since our health care system is so great and Canada’s is so shitty, that certainly explains why 10 years of polling shows that Canadians are far more satisfied with their health-care system than Americans. Check out the article in the Fall 2006 edition of YES! magazine (http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1498)…oh, wait…that would mean dealing with facts. Maybe you should just stay in your fantasy world.
Greg Finger, Charlotte
Q:Where does a Canadian go for 1st class medical care?
A: Across the bridge.
Its an old Michigan Joke