A major talking point amongst politicians has been the gradual decline of its citizen’s health. People dieing has become a “hot button” topic recently and candidates have hastily written their proposal the night before it was due. They’ve increased the font size and adjusted the margins to fill the required two pages, but they’ll still get a C- for not turning in anything useful.
Democrats want socialized medicine, but they can’t ask for it. Republicans want anything that isn’t socialized medicine, but still pleases special interest groups. Both groups give poor excuses as to why we shouldn’t have socialized medicine, which insult the collective intelligence of the entire country.
Some have suggested that we shouldn’t use Europe as a model for the United States, because we appreciate the free market. It’s good point too, after modeling our ruling council after Rome, and drafting the entire Constitution and everything we stand for after French Enlightenment thinkers, we wouldn’t want to dare look to Europe for answers… international copyright laws and all that.
Still, we don’t want to put mayonnaise on French fries or abandon baseball for soccer. We’d just settle for readily available medical care so we can live.
Other excuses include longer wait times at the doctor’s office, which should appeal to our hectic stressful lifestyles where there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done.
Ironically the stress of this mentality is causing many health problems, which has caused us to need frequent medical care for ulcers, insomnia and high blood pressure. If we took some time to relax in the waiting room for monthly checkups we’d be in better shape.
Last ditch efforts to torpedo socialized medicine hail from 1940’s McCarthyism, they’re hunting down the “reds” who want to allow “Little Ivan Communistovich” to take over America with socialized medicine. Before we know it socialized medicine will make us lose the war, or bring us peace without honor.
The real problem is that all of this negativity against socialized medicine gets in the way of a real healthcare solution. Old and inefficient biases create pointless and inefficient policies whose main goal is more to get the canidate elected than it is to help American citizens.
Hillary Clinton has devised such a plan on which to base her healthcare platform. Clinton will create a system where healthcare is mandatory. Tax credits would be given to families based on a percentage of their income to help them pay for coverage. So the lower class would get larger break, the middle class would be about where they are now, and of course the upper class would continue to be just fine as they have had premium health insurance the whole time anyway.
Aside from tax breaks the plan doesn’t seem to do much that can’t be done voluntarily. Insurance companies are not unwilling to sell us health insurance, as much as they are willing to charge criminally high prices and deny care whenever they feel they can get away with it.
The mandate was compared briefly by the Clinton campaign to the mandate many states require regarding car insurance. Many Republican candidates are quick to point out that as Americans we don’t like government interference in free trade. When it comes to requiring car insurance you won’t hear this complaint from the same people. While required by the government it enjoys little regulation.
If health insurance functions is a similar manner what will actually change? Those who actually have health insurance are famous for not being covered by it when at greatest need. So regardless of who it covers they will be paying more out of their budget for something they couldn’t afford to begin with, that in the end may or may not help them at all.
For the plan to work in anything resembling an efficient or helpful manner it would require government regulation, which just brings most politicians back to foretelling doomsday prophecies about “commies” and robot overlords controlling our every move.