Your neighbor, whom you do not like, is a friend of Government. So he traveled to Washington and asked the Powers there if he could collect from you $200 every month. He put his finger aside his nose and winked to hint that he would be generous with the largess, that a portion of his new income (a kickback) would find its way into the reelection coffers of the Powers.
The Powers naturally went for it.
You now have to give your crony neighbor $300 every month. Yes: well it would have been $200, but your neighbor opened his spreadsheet and discovered that the act of collecting money from you would cause him to incur certain costs, which he must defer by charging you more. But don’t worry, he first asked the Powers and they said OK. That made it legal.
Now it’s not like you don’t get anything for your money. Why, every time you go to a doctor, chosen from a small list prepared by your neighbor, and the doctor (say) cauterizes your mental wounds (caused by pondering your diminishing bank account), you get to hand your doctor another $20 or so.
The doctor will then fill out a piece of paper and give it to your neighbor telling him that it costs $150 to supply the current for your electroshock therapy (part of this includes costs for the time he must spend filling out the ponderous form). Your neighbor will look at his spreadsheet and see that he has agreed with the Powers that he will reimburse the doctor only $100 for this procedure. After deducting a $25 fee for allowing the doctor to be on the list, your neighbor writes the doctor a check.
In this way you are said to have received “free” health “insurance.”
You might not think this state of affairs kosher, but that’s where you’re wrong. See, the neighbor on your other side (your good neighbor) also was made to pay your bad neighbor. Your good neighbor, being made of stronger stuff than you, was incensed and he traveled to Washington to complain. There he was scolded and told by robed Powers that the money he must pay his neighbor was a “tax”, even though all agreed that it was not, and the Powers have no limit on what taxes they might levy.
A “tax”, incidentally, is money paid to a government. Money you’re forced to give to non-governmental third parties used to be called “extortion.” This just shows that language evolves and words mean what the Powers say they do. (See, inter alia, “marriage“.)
Anyway, your good neighbor thought it absurd he should have to give his conniving bad neighbor his own hard-earned wages, so he didn’t. The Powers then came after your good neighbor and said, “If you don’t give your money to our friend, you will be assessed a ‘fine’, which you must give to us. If you do not give us this ‘fine’, you will go to jail.” Your good neighbor, like you, paid.
That’s where we now sit. It is ensconced precedent, the Law Of The Land, that any private citizen can sidle up to the Powers and make clandestine deals (“You have to pass it to see what’s in it”) in which the Powers can make you give your assets to other private citizens. The conclusion (in the form of a bad pun) is that you are powerless to stop it. Leviathan has grown too fat to budge. It will be fun to see what label the next grab is given.
But wait, there’s more! The Powers reasoned that because they forced you to pay your neighbor under the banner of health “care” they (the Powers) could then regulate every aspect of what they perceived to be health. They said, “Unhealthy people will cause increases in the money they must give to our cronies, therefore the people must not be allowed to be unhealthy.” The proscriptions have only just began. It will be amusing to guess what will be banned next. It’s for your own good.
This article is not an analogy, dear readers, but the literal truth. All that is wrong is the bureaucracy is deeper than I indicated and my figures too low.
Dr. Briggs, you left out some of the most important aspects of ‘free’ health care.
Who will supply the software to standardize medical records? Who will operate the air ambulance fleet? Who will chair the boards of the endless committees setup to find efficiencies in this new system? Who will manage the national ‘communication’ strategy for the services the system offers to its ‘clients’? Now that the entire thing is under the umbrella of Uncle Sam, who will unionize it? Who will conduct the inquiries when billions of investments in to these things goes missing?
The initial outlay of a few hundred smackers will seem like peanuts compared to all of the costs associated with ‘fixing’ this new system.
Enjoy!
“If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.” — P.J. O’Rourke
Health is a personal condition, not a commodity or service you can buy. Therefore you can’t buy health insurance or health care. The politicians are just promising to pay your doctor bill with other people’s money. Politicians love to brag about all the good things they do by spending other people’s money. Robbing Peter to pay Paul makes them grade A humanitarians
Life Isn’t Fair. Part IV.
It is amazing how people decriyng public health care have no misunderstanding of how it really works.
1- Two links that shows why health care in the US is bad.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/21-graphs-that-show-americas-health-care-prices-are-ludicrous/
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html
From the first link you can see 21 graphs that shows how expensive the US health is compared to other socialize healthcare.
On average, in the US, the cost of health care is twice as high as in other countries for about any service received.
The argument that the government is steeling our money to pay for health care is ludicrous, since if we had to pay it for hourselves it would cost us at least 2 times more any time we had to receive any services.
Any Citizen in Canada doesn’t think twice before going to the hospital. When we are sick we go to the hospital, or clinic and get checked. If our condition is serious we are treated immediately (my father had surgery within a week of being diagnosed with early stage colon cancer).
The second links explains how ridiculous the billing is.
2-Rationing in public health care:
Yes there are some rationing in our health care, but nothing that compares to the rationing seen in the US.
Before Obama care, there was a cap on the value of care one person could receive. The insurance could kick out anyone who paid is premium for the craziest of reason. A small children born with a cardiac condition could easily go through is lifetime cap in the first years of is life.
I’ll be back later.
We have health care in New Zealand just check it out.
It is not as cheap as Canada as consultation fees make it difficult for the poorer people to visit the doctor but we don’t seem to have crippling hospital bills.
The money comes from taxes on income. The richer people have health insurance if they want it.
Accidental injuries are taken care of. especially in the case of natural disasters.It is called Accident Compensation Insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_New_Zealand
I’m extremely relieved everytime I get back here and find the usual miscomprehension, misrepresentation and overall bad argumentation from you mr Briggs. It’s like as if the cosmos does have a sense of stability.
I mean, not even in Easter will we find Briggs easing the senses and reaching out for consensus. Nor even in Christmas, where we will probably have a newer rant about all the bad things atheist liberals are doing to your poor, maligned country. Perhaps the War on Christmas.
Luis,
Now 200 words and no argument. Reach 400 and you will be an honorary Democrat. Happy & Blessed Easter, brother.
Mr Briggs,
What you have in the US is not even close of being government run health care or socialize health care.
In the USA, the government doesn’t own any hospitals, except may be military hospital, the doctor and nurses are not government employee like cops, military, and others.
In Canada, every hospital is own by the government, every doctor and nurses, except those who are in the private, are paid by the government. The price of any provincial intervention is set by the provincial government. The salaries of doctor are set through negotiation. Any doctor is free to choose between the private and the public.
Small clinic are privately owned but prices of intervention are the same for any clinic associated to the public.
Yes, healthcare is not free since it is paid from our taxes, but since everyone (except a very lucky few), everyone goes to the hospital at some point in their life. In Canada, everyone has or is prepaid for whatever your Heath condition might be.
In the US, a child born with fibroses cystic, before Obama care, couldn’t be insured because of pre-existing condition. In Canada, that child will be cared for all is life. In the US, that child was to the mercy to how much is parent were rich. Of course, hospitals will offer last resort care and in many cases will end up, or ended up with the ruined costumer houses.
Ah, yes — like Humpty Dumpty’s explanation to Alice: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
There is so much evolving these days too. Words, attitudes, and of course costs. Medicare started out in 1965 with a budget of $12 billion but it expanded to $90 billion in just one year. The rate of increase was 9.8% in just 2009. Estimates of Obamacare costs will ‘evolve’ in like fashion, I truly believe.