Thank goodness Congress went on vacation before passing a health care
program. Now we can have a month for adequate debate. Remember the
Stimulus bill, TARP? It consisted of 1,013 pages appropriated $787
million and no one read the final version before all Democrats voted
for it, in an overnight slam-bang, push-push procedure. Just part of
the operational approach that the White House is using to get all
government to continue quickly down the road to socialism before people
uncover his schemes and his popularity continues to drop.
My
concern over our present health care system is not about quality
because it is undoubtedly the best that can be had anywhere in the
world. No, it is all about cost and the two situations that I
questioned Congressman Peter Welch about were these:
1. Cost
increases due to our lack of border control allowing illegal aliens to
load up the system which raises our insurance premiums.
2. Cost
increases due to frivolous malpractice law suits and defensive ordering
of marginal tests. The insurance premiums for physicians are
excessively high because of the open end nature of exorbitant pain and
suffering awards by manipulated juries. I asked about limiting award
amounts.
Peter Welch did respond, not like his predecessor
Bernie Sanders who never responds to anything but praise. He thanked me
for contacting him about "my opposition to a universal health care
system." He included the usual vague platitudes about "passing
legislation that makes health care affordable and accessible to
everyone" but no details about how he would do it and no answers about
my cost questions. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, this is
what politicians do. So much for constituent input to our
representatives.
Costs are the major issue connected with any
health care plan; therefore, we should look at the mistakes that have
been made by the U.K., Euro-care and Canada with their government run
programs.
They can't control costs. First of all, being a
government program it is subject to the will of politicians. Has there
ever been a program run or controlled by them that was cost conscious?
AmTrak, post office, Social Security Ponzi scheme, Fanny Mae, Freddie
Mac. No, governments are not set up to do this work. They should set up
rules by which programs are operated, check on how well they perform to
their mandates and then get out of the way for private enterprise to
provide the competition necessary for acceptable costs.
If Obama
thinks he can pay for a new system by cutting costs, let him try it and
bank the results first, before destroying our current program.
We
cannot live with a government run "single payer" system or we will be
repeating the same socialist errors so plainly evident in Europe and
Canada. Try your luck with Congressional non-answers!
Olin E. Potter lives in Waitsfield.
