The healthcare scam government involvement isnt the solution

One of the most predominant issues of this past presidential election is the dispute on health care. Politicians such as President-elect Barack Obama have stated that health-care is a right to every American, and that the government should intervene through expanding initiatives such as Medicare, mandating visits to doctors, or even nationalizing the whole health care system in its entirety. Politicians back their claims with statistics stating that millions of Americans are without health insurance, stories of successful government run health other countries, and concerns that America’s health care industry is behind the times due to the fact that it is run by a free market economy standard. Nothing is more outlandish and revolting. The reason health care is failing in the United States is because we have too much government intervention already. The reality is we haven’t allowed the private sector to handle itself in regards to health care for decades.
The ramifications of past government intervention in health care have been dire. The government bankrupts, over regulates, and corrupts any monetary decisions. The government’s Medicare program alone has never had a higher surplus than what it originally started with when founded in 1965, and has been running a rapidly growing deficit ever since. At this point, experts believe that by 2040, there will be a one trillion dollar Medicare deficit. There is simply no way to pay for programs such as Medicare, so long as the government runs it. And while some may jump to conclusions, the Medicare program wasn’t weakened by the Bush administration alone. Ever since its creation in the sixties, the surplus has dropped, leading to the deficit five times larger than the original surplus. One reason for this is that the government doesn’t devote taxed monetary funds designated for Medicare just to Medicare itself. Instead, the government finds loopholes to spend this money on many other projects such as infrastructure, bailouts, and even the war in Iraq.
Another serious problem with our current health care system is over-regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. One outstanding example is the 1962 Kefauver Harris amendments to the Food and Drug Act. These regulations, which concerned the pharmaceutical industry, were enacted to “protect” the American public, but have caused irreparable harm in terms of both money and lives. According to a study by Dr. Mary Ruwart, former leading candidate for the 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nomination, 80 percent of the cost of new pharmaceuticals is due to the Kefauver Harris amendments. Ruwart also states that because these regulations allow the FDA to continuously increase the requirements for new drug development, the time to take a product from the laboratory bench to the marketplace has tripled since 1962 from 4.5 years to 15 years. This means that the American people must literally die waiting for a drug to come out for treatment.
A great example of this concerns the anti-ulcer drug Tagamet®. Before Tagamet® came to market, the treatment for ulcers was surgery at a cost of approximately $25,000. However when Tagamet® came to the market place, treatment for ulcers cost only $2,000 for the proper dosage. Health-care costs for ulcer disease were slashed over 90 percent by switching patients to this radical new drug. Now imagine how low health care costs could be if Americans didn’t lose 50 percent of our new innovations due to the Kefauver Harris regulation expansion.
While pharmaceutical laws and mismanagement of government funds are both concerns, the most important problem with our health care crisis is the ideology that the solution should be universal health care, more aptly called socialized medicine. This ideology must be reversed no matter what. We have seen many examples of socialized medicine countries that have failed. Some examples of these failures include countries such as Britain, Canada, and Israel who implement socialized medicine often have low quality health care, and long waiting lists for treatment. For example in Britain, kidney dialysis is routinely denied to seniors on the grounds that the resources might serve society better by keeping them for the young. In a town in British Columbia, Canada there is a drawing in which the winner gets a rare prize: a visit to the doctor’s office. It is also common knowledge that Canadians flood our northern states in order to get the cardiac bypasses and hip replacements that they need without having to suffer through a two-year queue in their socialized medicine program. Of course, only the well-to-do have this option; the poor literally die waiting for the care they have been promised. It is clear that socialized medicine has never worked, and never will. The government simply cannot run anything that the private sector is capable of doing.
Politicians such as Barack Obama promise that even though the government has failed at every attempt to run anything in the public sector, socialized medicine will work today. When it comes to health care, it is simply too dangerous to allow the government to run something directly affiliated to matters of life and death.