The trouble with Health Care...

Okay, everyone is jumping on board the new Health Care for Every American train. Somehow, if we just put the government in charge, they'll fix everything (that they broke), and we'll end up with free health care for everybody, and we'll be happy healthy people singing kumbayah beside unicorns farting rainbows.

First off, show me one thing the government has taken over from private business that has shown improvement. One.

Second of all, repeat after me: "there ain't no thing as a free lunch!"

Okay, so you say I don't know what I'm talking about. Europeans and Canadians have Universal Health Care, and it's better than Viagra and a set of blonde twins! Well, I'll save the facts about that for another post (hint; it ain't as good as you think it is), and refer you to someone who indisputable knows what he's talking about: Dr. David McKalip.

He has posted a transcript of his testimony before the Pennsylvania House Health Care Policy Task Force.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

While in my first practice at San Francisco General Hospital, I saw the many shortcomings of a government run hospital. Even with dedicated professional health care staff, the constant budget shortfalls, debt and politically motivated regulatory burdens drained the hospital there. Patients waited weeks to go to rehabilitation units while patients in private systems went in days. Repeat patients never took responsibility for their own health — always assuming that the public system would be there for them. I went to San Francisco a young liberal and left two years later a disillusioned doctor.

and

Many utopian dreamers are motivated by the best of intentions and envision that the best way to achieve high quality health care is to create a system by which the government will control all health care spending and ensure that it is equitable, efficient and proper. They are basing their approach on an economic philosophy that has failed many times in history — one of collectivism and central economic planning. Many of those advocating such a system believe that if an elite group of all knowing and benevolent planners control spending, that nothing but good will result. Unfortunately this had never been the case as evidenced by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lack of property and individual rights in societies under dictators, and recent examples of failing government-run school systems in America with a never-ending supply of money.

Those advocating single payer systems don't understand that what made America great was not centrally planned economies.

He goes on to destroy pretty much every myth concerning the beauty of single payer systems (there really aren't any, if you look closely), and the horrors of free enterprise managing health care (there are many horrors, but every one is lesser than the result of centrally planned efforts).

For every one of you that thinks Universal Health Care is good, but don't want to argue with me cause I'm just an ignorant musician, read this article. Then see how you feel.