The new head of Medicare — appointed by Obama without so much as a Congressional hearing — has been a proponent of rationing and holds up the British model of socialized medicine as both the moral and practical model for America to follow. Americans should take note of this. Only a decade and a half ago, most Americans expressed outrage over HMOs making decisions about patient treatment. At least HMOs had to compete with each other. At least HMOs were allowed to make a profit and therefore had something to lose by providing rotten service. In fact, HMOs eventually backed down because of consumer unhappiness over many of their methods. But do most Americans understand that under the emerging ObamaCare law, the government–not the private sector, but the government–will operate as one gigantic HMO? Once ObamaCare wipes out what’s left of the private sector in health insurance, through taxes and regulations, there will be nothing left but one gigantic HMO run by a few government bureaucrats in Washington. This means not only (1) red tape and inefficiency — something all of government is known for — and (2) bankruptcy, the fate of every government program. It also means that politicians and unelected bureaucrats will be making value judgments and medical decisions previously left to doctors and patients.
Everybody seems to want freedom in medicine, but nobody seems to want a free market in medicine. It’s going to be really interesting, to say the least, to watch Americans as they begin to experience less freedom in medicine than ever before — in fact, no real freedom at all. Maybe then, and only then, will they yearn for the control and practice and, yes, the pricing of medicine to be handed over to doctors and patients in the marketplace. The “marketplace” of medicine simply means the freedom of doctors and patients to communicate with one another through a competitive pricing system which naturally evolves over time, as in other industries such as automobiles and computers. That pricing structure is now being replaced with people who work in government offices in Washington DC, and — worse still — their corrupt political bosses in the White House and Congress.
Socialized medicine has arrived. It will take a year or two to implement, but it’s descending on us like a cloak of death and destruction. Other nations, such as Canada and Britain, have not thrown it off. Will America?