The single dumbest complaint concerning health care in the United States is cost. Let me put it to you plain and simple. If a surgeon reaches inside of your family members body, removes a kidney, reaches inside of your body, inserts that kidney, and both of you live, that is going to cost something. To expect that it would cost nothing, is asinine. To expect that it would be covered by a $10 copay or even a $1000 deductible, is asinine.

Let me give you a little context about the “outrageous” rise in health care cost. It wasn’t long ago, let’s say a hundred and fifty years or so, that revolutionary health care amounted to, “Take this whisky, try not to cry as I amputate your leg.” Then things became better. Less than a hundred years ago or so health care amounted to, “Take this morphine, try not to cry as I amputate your leg.”

Today we have laser scalpels, fiber optic cameras, MRI machines, gene therapy, slews of vaccines, designer antibiotics, sonograms, and other technologies that make the state of medicine just a few decades ago seem like barbarism. From research we now know more about the human body and its operations than was ever thought possible. That research costs enormous sums of money and an investment of time from our nation’s most industrious minds.

When people complain about the rising cost of a doctors visit or a trip to the specialist, they completely disregard the enormous sums of money and the investment of time needed to develop their doctors skill. They ignore the technology that is being used to diagnose and treat them and the cost it took not just to develop but then manufacture and now maintain. Arguments for Government run health care systems almost always ignore this cost too. That is why the most exciting innovation and sought after medical surgeons come from the United States and are not found in Canada. That is why American developed technology is fed into innovation starved nations that have socialized medicine.

The main benefit of our technological and intellectual advance, is that people are living longer than ever before. Ailments that were once life threatening are now easily cured. Other ailments that were never thought to be curable are. It costs an enormous amount of money and drains an equally enormous amount of resources from our society to maintain our growing life expectancy. To believe that we can continue to keep our life expectance rise, but watch medical bills decrease is to ignore fundamental principals of economics.

Put another way, you cannot subscribe to a service that gets better every month because it adds more features that cost more money to acquire while expecting that each month you will pay less. That service would not be around very long with that business model. Somehow people expect this to be the business model for health care. Add more people who don’t pay while expecting the level of service to rise and the cost to consumers who do pay to fall. There is no way a thinking person could ever expect that to work. That, however, is exactly the argument being pushed by Democrats.

Of course the cost of health care has gone up with our growing life expectance. The drain on our resources and money to keep people alive is enormous. The reason many fear the potential creation of “death panels” or Government agencies doing the work currently done by private insurance, is that our technology has become so vast, individuals who have no ability to live on their own can be kept alive for many years by machine.

Each of us creates a benefit to the world by being alive in some way. This can be as small as giving a smile and encouragement to a child who will take that and grow. It can be as mundane as the labor we provide for industry. It can be as important as innovation we create that revolutionizes the world. We are facing a growing trend of having people live so long with a dependence on technology, that they consume far more resources than their frail bodies provide. To be honest, some of these people consume more resources than they ever provided to society in their entire life to society. That is a judgement call though, one I don’t want the government making.

Currently we pay doctors and insurance companies to help make decisions with families to decide how these matters are handled. For an alternative, consider what happened when government became involved in the Terri Schiavo case. Now imagine that circus happening on a daily basis when our nation has a say in making health care decisions for individuals. Now imagine the enormous cost the public and individuals to battle these decisions in court.

In addition to all of this, American citizens have adopted terrible lifestyle habits. We are fatter than ever in our history, more sedentary and yet more stressed. Those who work in our nation encounter extreme amounts of mental stress and are working far more than the forty hours that often appears on their timecards. Those who manage homes and children have to deal with immense pressures from outside influences. They face financial struggles and mental stresses that can destroy households. We have an enormous divorce rate leaving families broken and children starting life in poverty. While we enjoy the healthiest era of our existence, we make personal choices and lead lives that are equally as unhealthy. We also face problems with alcoholism, drug abuse, promiscuous sex and the spread of disease from the increased ability for sick individuals to travel great distances at rapid speed.

The cost is great to bridge the gap between the ability to cure our ails and the personal choices that destroy ones health through action or mental stress. The contributions to the growing cost of health care are vast but they are easily understandable. The level of care in our country has made a quantum leap from just a few decades ago. Sane individuals cannot expect this level to continue increasing but not expect it to cost enormous sums of money. Nor can they expect to cover more people, over a longer period of time, for less money.

Undoubtedly there is waste, fraud and abuse. All of this needs to be rooted out, not just from the medical community but from the government programs like Medicaid that already exist. This should be agreeable by everyone. Democrats, however, have repeatedly foiled attempts to actually remove waste from the system. Coveting their voter blocks over the wealth and well being of our citizens, they have resisted tort reform and crackdowns on Medicare and Medicaid waste and abuse. Resisting new oversight of government programs already in place, they simply want to expand them. This ignores the reality that expanding systems of abuse will only lead to more abuse. In this case ignoring abuse will also result in the continued massive rise in the cost of health care, the very problem their expansion is supposed to solve.

Put simply, the level of expectation of individuals for a growth in care but a decline in cost is baffling.

Drudge has info on a C-SPAN interview in which the President declares that the nation is out of money, suggesting Medicare and Medicaid are the culprits. However he suggests growing government run healthcare is the solution.

This is all going to end badly, isn’t it?

As I drove past a local gas station last night I thought about the stimulus and in a true moment of schadenfreude I chuckled. You see each and every year I am astounded by the hysterical nature of our nation; it is an almost immutable law that crude oil prices rise in the summer and lower in the winter. People travel in the summer and more energy is used to cool buildings and machinery making the cost to produce power rise creating a cycle that loops and feeds back into itself. We run amusement parks, we drive more, we fly more, we do almost everything imaginable that can cause a rise in oil prices.

This is of course a matter of supply and demand and yet each time Congress acts as if it is the first and only time, businesses make layoffs pretending the same, people complain and complain and then complain some more forgetting that this is a temporary spike and believing instead it is an end to Western civilization. Then, October and November comes and the problem goes away.

Continue Reading →