I was greatly saddened to witness the passing of President Obama’s health-care bill and by the fact that our own Suzanne Kosmas had given in and voted for it, along with the majority of the Democrats. I had hoped that I could be saying that the country owes Suzanne and other Democrats a great debt of gratitude for helping defeat one of the worst most destructive pieces of legislation ever to come out of Washington, but sadly that is not the case.
Why is this such a terrible bill? Let us count some of the ways.
First and foremost, it paves the path to a national health-care system with the government controlling virtually all aspects of our health care. Anybody familiar with the national health care systems in other countries knows what that will mean.
Some of the immediate effects that will come about in the next few years include the disappearance of most or all of the private insurance for health care companies. Our ability to choose a doctor will gradually disappear over time. The right of a doctor to run a private practice will be eroded away over time.
Some further fall out will include the disappearance of a really active medicine development process. Out drug development will start to resemble the pathetic process in Europe .
The number of American trained doctors will start to decrease as our young people opt away from medicine and our veteran doctors take earlier retirement than they had originally planned.
You will start to see ever lengthening waiting lines to get medical care.
People will quit traveling to the U.S because our medicine will eventually be no better than the rest of the world.
The people who support this bill will declare that most of what I have stated here is not explicitly spelled out in the bill. That may be true, but the above stated things that will happen are unstoppable consequences of the contents of the bill.
There are some other very bad things that will eventually result from this bill such as “gentle” euthanasia as some life saving treatments will be denied to patients as not being worh the expense because of the patient's age or other factors.
This list of bad things that will eventually result from this goes on and on. People hope that it can be reversed; but reversal will be quite difficult.
There are several mitigating circumstances surrounding this bill. First, most people are healthy so they will not need medical care, Second, with national health care it is possible to cut the amount of money spent nationwide on medicine simply by letting the waiting lines get longer and longer and getting rid of doctors, hospitals, medical research and equipment. I doubt that this is what Americans want but that is what they will get..
Last but not least, there will eventually be a vibrant black market in medical treatment and enterprising doctors will set up shop “underground” or out of the country and out of the reach of our government.