The Medical Freedom Channel

We already have socialized health care in the US – it’s just disguised under a needlessly complex system of regulation, in a combination of mercantilism (which is another form of socialism) and taxation. We’ve also had that socialized medicine system since the mid-sixties – oddly enough, from about the very time costs started soaring through the roof.

Meanwhile, consider this: The people who invariably give out grades for the best healthcare are mostly diehard proponents of socializing medicine (along with everything else, for that matter).

And a third point for your consideration: socialized systems are parasitic on private systems, and cannot exist for long without their host/victim. Without a private system in existence, there’s no way for the socialized system to have any idea how to set prices or what services to provide. Instead some moron somewhere sets a quota, with no conception of what this should properly be, even were there justification for doing so.

I note that all the proposed schemes for nationalizing healthcare intend to leave a remnant of the private system in place, so they’ll have some clue as to what to do and what to charge.

But that’s not the only mode by which the bloodsucking socialists exist off the life of others. All of the socialist systems that you hear such glowing reports about were set up by drafting the people and resources that the pre-existing private system had built up, to work in the shiny new socialist system.

All the great doctors, nurses and technicians, who had already worked their butts off to practice medicine, were indentured into service to the new socialized regimes. The question for advocates of American nationalized healthcare is simple: How are you going to replace this generation you intend to essentially enslave with the next?

You can’t force someone to learn to be a good doctor. Who the hell is going to work for – what is it eight or ten years of medical school? – just to go to work for the state? Certainly not the best and the brightest – not by a long shot, to be sure.

Of course, we could emulate Britain, and end up importing our doctors and nurses from the impoverished parts of the world. Most of these folks are, after all, highly trained and dedicated people who just want a better life for them and theirs. Inevitably, though, you’ll end up picking up at least a few who hope to wreak vengeance on the West.

Given our continuing warmongering and interventionist foreign policy, going to the Doctor could become a lot like playing Russian roulette. Do you really want to be asking yourself, “Is this doctor I am now seeing someone who had half his family blown away by the ‘collateral damage’ at a wedding party?”

Meawhile, as living standards rise in India, China and elsewhere, one has to wonder how much longer even those doctors will wish to come to practice over here. Eventually, you’ll end up with state-trained doctors, nurses and technicians, a condition which one source (it may have been on the Lew Rockwell website, though memory fails at the moment) recently termed as “Lenin Care.”

On top of all these practical considerations, there is the ethical question, which all libertarians worthy of the name must always consider: This idea is at its base morally repugnant, due to the element of coercion it involves. At some point, there must be a cadre of armed men, dragooned into service to enforce the whims of the national medical committee – on we the people, each and everyone of us.

Of course this is to a large extent what we already have, and this is the very nature of the problem with our medical care system.

The entire argument currently, whether over SCHIP or addressing broader reforms, is not about whether we should have socialized medical care; we’ve seemingly crossed that border a while back. The only topic for debate now seems to be which tyrannical model the democrats and republicans intend to force on us, on behalf of their respective corporate clients.

The only real solution, as usual, is to remove the heavy hand of government from medicine altogether: A separation of medicine and state. You remember that one? The “America = Freedom” argument. After all, freedom was what this country was supposed to be about.

Of course, if you can’t hack freedom, you can always go to Canada, get your shiny health card, and queue up to wait for the “free” services.