Your house?  Your car dealership?  And give it to someone else?  Put you out of business?  Put all your employees out of a job?

All of this is so d@mned unconstitutional, it is a wonder that the bones of the Founding Fathers haven't risen from their graves to haunt us.  How devastated they would be to see what we tolerate now.

Great article here.

Answer: State-provided health care programs that drastically exceeded their initial budget estimates.

It doesn't matter how well-intentioned the programs' drafters are, human nature being what it is, the costs of these kinds of programs always soar out of control.  And there is, contrary to what Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid might think, an upper limit to what you can confiscate in taxes.

with the American public.  To my way of thinking, too many conservative writers are trying too hard to look "fair."  It's one thing to refrain from ascribing malevolent motives to someone (à la, "Barack Obama wants old people to die.")  It is quite another to pretend that, when (not "if") rationing happens, government bureaucrats aren't going to make decisions pursuant to which real people actually die.  They will.

Read the whole thing here.  It's refreshing in its honesty, and I like it when conservatives take on other conservatives!

When you go from talking about "health care" or "medical treatment" generally, and start talking about the specifics of actual medical specialties, the implications become even more grave.

Compelling article here by Dr. Ronald Dworkin.

It's one thing to initiate an end-of-life conversation with your doctor, your spouse, your attorney, your children.  It's quite another when the entity that is paying your medical bills starts asking, "Have you ever wondered when life wouldn't be worth living anymore?"

It's called being railroaded.

"We are God's partners in matters of life and death"??????  What kind of unsurpassed arrogance is this?  I swear, maybe some of the people who think B.O. is the Antichrist are onto something here.  Has any other politician in modern memory claimed to be a "partner" (and thus "equal") with God, and in matters of who lives and who dies?  And he says this as the country erupts with angry citizens, terrified at the prospect of a federal bureaucracy set in place by Obama to decide who gets what care - if any?

And I don't want to hear any blather about how he "misspoke."  There are dozens of things he could have said.  He could have said that God asks us all to aid each other through life and death.  He could have said that our faith requires that we assist those who are sick and dying.  His particular phraseology, however, says something very different. 

... well, "honor" is probably not the right word, but still, this amused me to no end.

Here is Part One.

And Part Two.

... admits that their system is "imploding."  Here's an excerpt:

The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country's health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country - who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting - recognize that changes must be made.

"We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize," Doing [sic] said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"We know that there must be change," she said. "We're all running flat out, we're all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands."

Even better:

The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there's a critical need to make Canada's health-care system patient-centred. He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.

His thoughts on the issue are already clear. Ouellet has been saying since his return that "a health-care revolution has passed us by," that it's possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and "that competition should be welcomed, not feared."

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

Read the whole thing here.

I agree with the editors of National Review Online that rationing - by which they mean personal decision-making - by price, is far better than rationing by government policy.  The potential recipients of the care should be the ones deciding what they can afford and what makes sense under the circumstances.  NOT some government bureaucrat or "health care panel."

BUT ...

Rationing by price is only fair and sensible if the prices are fair and sensible.  As I wrote in my column today, the problem with our health care "system" now is that it isn't really a private exchange anymore, and too many Americans could never afford to pay for the care they receive.  Of course new and experimental treatments will be expensive - at least initially.  But, unlike so many other commodities and services, the price never seems to go down as more people have access to these treatments.

We have GOT to get the root of the skyrocketing costs.  Otherwise, not only will single-payer health care be inevitable, the collapse of the health care system - with or without a single-payer system - will be inevitable as well.  And that is the real looming crisis.

Victor Davis Hanson lays it on the line, as usual.  And I was gratified to read this line:

"Nothing is worse for a president than a growing belief among the public that it has been had."

True.  But there were those that warned Americans about who Obama is and what his viewpoints are.  (And I was one of them.) And then:

"...there is a growing fear that Obamism is becoming cult-like and Orwellian. Almost on script, Hollywood ceased all its Rendition/Redacted–style films. Iraq — once the new Vietnam — is out of the news. Afghanistan is “problematic,” not a “blunder.” Tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act, and Predators are no longer proof of a Seven Days in May coup, but legitimate tools to keep us safe. Words change meanings as acts of terror become “man-caused disasters.” Hunting down jihadists is really an “overseas contingency operation.” Media sycophants do not merely parrot Obama, but now proclaim him a “god.” New York Times columnists who once assured us that Bush’s dastardly behavior was proof of American pathology now sound like Pravda apologists in explaining the “real” Obama is not what he is beginning to seem like."

Uh ...yeah.  And I've been calling them the "Pravda press" for over a year now.

VDH ends today's piece, as he usually does, with a modulated tone that avoids any predictions.  Probably sensible.  But I would go further (surprise, surprise) and argue that those who oppose Obama's big government takeovers must see to it that the public knows exactly what Obama has planned (since the media sure as hell won't).  If that happens - as it has with health care - Obama's popularity will continue to drop.  A majority of this country does not want a socialist country.

The only thing tempering insatiable human demand is the fact that the person providing the wanted item expects something of value in exchange – usually money. As much as liberals love to denounce the profit motive, it is precisely the insistence upon an exchange of value that keeps what would otherwise be limitless human demand in check.

Government purports to be “above” mere money-grubbing profit motives, and people assume this is an improvement.  But it is actually the problem ... Without the checks and balances inherent in the “my-wants-versus-your-profit-motive” dynamic, demand will skyrocket, supplies will shrink, and shortages will occur. Why must supplies shrink? Because the government cannot command doctors to work more than 24 hours in a day. It cannot command that complex surgeries take less time. It cannot command the chemical reactions in pharmaceutical manufacturing to occur faster. All it can do is ration what there is.

What triggers these cost overruns? The Joint Economic Committee’s report explains that “initial public estimates appear simply to have underestimated the level of demand for the proposed new benefits, perhaps due to insufficient data or a lack of experience administering benefits of that sort.”

Also, government lacks the profit motive, which generally forces private-sector managers to control costs, lest they get fired. Private supervisors also have incentives to boost profits: bonuses, corner offices, stock options, and promotions. In government, carefully stewarding taxpayer dollars might advance one’s career. But because bureaucrats rarely earn bonuses, and there are no stocks to option in public agencies, government workers lack the accountability that pay-for-performance brings. And they rarely get sacked.

 

 Health care slaves? “Public goods” versus private exchange.

Conservative public policy is often attacked because it fails to “fix” human nature. But liberal public policy usually fails because it ignores human nature. A conversation I had at a business law conference I attended two weeks ago drove this point home to me anew.

Having served on a well-attended panel entitled “Conservatism in Academe,” early on in the conference, I was fair game for anyone wanting to challenge conservative principles and policies. Later in the week, a colleague chatting with me over cocktails tried to defend single-payer health care. “I believe in having a civil society,” she explained pleasantly, “and in a civil society, I think health care should be a ‘public good.’”

Saying that health care is a “public good” sounds wonderful – the kind of statement with which no intelligent and compassionate person could disagree. But, as with so many blanket statements made by liberals, it does not hold up under scrutiny, and in fact the infrastructure necessary to deliver on such an apparently compassionate policy inevitably results in disappointment, failure, and – if the latter is not acknowledged – oppression by the very government it was hoped would be the solution to all human ills. Why is this so? Three basic reasons, all inarguable:

1. No one “owns” another human being’s work.

A “public good” ought to be something that everyone needs access to, but no one should own, like air or water. Although human beings might unlawfully pollute or otherwise make these public goods unavailable or unusable for their fellow creatures, humans did not create nor do they own these things, which preexisted us.

Unlike air or water, “health care” does not exist in the absence of another human being’s endeavors.  If someone decides to be a nurse, a pediatrician, an oncologist, or a neurosurgeon, he will spend (or borrow) the money, and devote months and years of study to acquire the necessary expertise. Someone else could get an engineering degree and invent a new stent, an MRI technology, a CT scan machine, or ultrasound. Still another could pursue her education in chemistry, and develop a compound that eventually becomes drug therapy for cancer, autism, diabetes, hypertension, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Groups of people get together, raise the necessary funds, and build offices, clinics, and hospitals. Multiply this activity by hundreds of thousands of people over decades, and you have a health care “system.” (Although even the term “system” is a misnomer here, since there is no single unifying power behind the development or delivery of the care). But none of these goods or services would exist without human beings’ creating, building, or deciding to deliver them.

To say that “health care” is a “public good” is to say that everyone has an equal right to these people’s time, their efforts, their energy; the services they choose to deliver, or the things they have devoted their lives’ work to developing. The unfairness of this assessment and the impossibility of its implementation is surely obvious: none of us “owns” anyone else’s time or creativity, and none of us have the right to demand free access to it. To claim otherwise is a form of indentured servitude. A free society depends upon free exchange: we request goods or services that another provides, and we must offer something that person views as having equal value. Which brings us to the second point.

2. If people think it is “free,” they will demand more of it than can be provided.

Characterizing health care as a “public good” is another way of saying that demand for it is potentially unlimited. This exposes the single largest flaw in the single-payer plans. Single-payer advocates like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank ignore human nature, and then hide behind their intentions when human nature rears its head: “We don’t have any intention of ‘rationing’ health care,” they claim. OK, let’s assume they don’t. But it won’t be their “intentions” that cause it to be rationed; it will be the fact that everyone will want more of it than they can have, because they have been told that it is their “right,” and that it is “free.”

A simple analogy should demonstrate this. Food is even more essential to human existence than health care, and yet we don’t argue that we have a “right” to “free” food. If your local supermarket was ordered to announce “Free food today!” would people casually stroll over and pick up a few items they needed? More likely, there would be a run on the store that would empty the shelves within minutes. Imagine that happening at every store, every day. How long could that system last?

The only thing tempering insatiable human demand is the fact that the person providing the wanted item expects something of value in exchange – usually money. As much as liberals love to denounce the profit motive, it is precisely the insistence upon an exchange of value that keeps what would otherwise be limitless human demand in check.

Government purports to be “above” mere moneygrubbing profit motives, and people assume this is an improvement. But it is actually the problem. Government “income” from tax dollars is not unlimited, despite perception to the contrary. Yet history is replete with instances of entities charging the government more than they would if they were billing a private entity. (Medicare fraud, anyone? Or perhaps you remember $500 toilet seats?) In point of fact, the costs of the goods and services after the government decides to provide them will be pretty much what they were before the government took over. Only now, the customers/recipients/patients think that they no longer have to pay for them. Without the checks and balances inherent in the “my-wants-versus-your-profit-motive” dynamic, demand will skyrocket, supplies will shrink, and shortages will occur. Why must supplies shrink? Because the government cannot command doctors to work more than 24 hours in a day. It cannot command that complex surgeries take less time. It cannot command the chemical reactions in pharmaceutical manufacturing to occur faster. All it can do is ration what there is.

 

 

3. There is no such thing as completely “equal” care, anyway

If demand for health care is limitless, governments’ pursuit of absurd and impossible results, seemingly, is not. And that pursuit has been the cause of untold misery. It is a very small step from saying that “health care is a ‘public good’” to saying that “equal quality health care is a ‘public good.’” After all, if I have a “right” to neurosurgery, then do I not also have a right to neurosurgery that is as good as that which someone in Los Angeles, Cleveland or Boston would get?

This, too, is untenable. Human beings may be “created equal” in the eyes of God, but they are certainly not created equal in terms of talent, skill, acuity, tenacity, or ability. The government cannot say, “Surgeon X must be of equal quality and skill as Surgeon Y.” Plenty - like the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, China and Cuba (note the pattern there) - have tried and failed. More recently, countries like Sweden have actually forbidden the private purchase of health care that is not paid for by the government, arguing that for some to get “better” care simply because they can afford to pay for it, is “unequal.” 

The primary problem with the delivery of health care in this country is not the model of private exchange, it is a cost structure that is making it increasingly difficult for the average American to pay for the care they receive. The correct model of reform is one that addresses unnecessary costs, not one that takes our most talented, productive and needed citizens, and makes them – and us – slaves to an unworkable and ultimately doomed government health care system.

I've been speaking on this issue for my paper, "Entrepreneurial Policy Design," but Deroy Murdock has a piece with even more statistics.  Read the whole thing here, and then ask yourself:  If the government's projections of $1.5 trillion (already a gasp-grabber) are off by a factor of NINE, as the Medicare projections were, then what?

And if they are off by a factor of SEVENTEEN as Medicaid special hospital supplement was, then what?  Complete government collapse, that's what.