Random Lengths News should be complemented for printing Matthew Weurker’s brilliant skewer of President Obama’s overreaching health care overhaul and overzealous international spying program. There is no better common ground, I find, between liberals and conservatives than the over-expansion of the federal government into our private lives.
In his editorial, Publisher James Preston Allen argues that Obamacare is bad not because of its multiple malfunctions, or the growing number of insured now becoming uninsured, although he does indict the corporate interests profiting at the expense of everyone else.
He actually decries the fact that President Obama and the Democrats in Washington settled for an individual mandate instead of implementing a single-payer, universal healthcare system, like the ones in Europe and Canada:
“A truly progressive position on health-care would be a publicly-owned, publicly-funded system that would resemble our public school system.”
I didn’t know whether the laugh or cry when I read that assertion.
The public school system in California, especially in the inner cities and in poorer regions, is racked with inefficiencies, corruption and nepotism. School board races in Lennox and a successful unification initiative in West Hawthorne both demonstrate a growing dissatisfaction from residents with their public school systems. Why would anyone invite such deficiencies into health care?
Most parents are not satisfied with a minimum standard of education, nor would they settle for a modicum of care in state-run medicine. The long lines, the rationing, the denial of care to those who cannot wait should encourage everyone in the United States to resist massive expansions of the government into the health care profession.
Last of all, Allen argued that Obamacare is better than anything that the Republicans have offered. That statement is untrue. Conservatives have advocated for permitting individuals to purchase health insurance from across state lines from private companies. Health care specialists like Dr. Ben Carson of John Hopkins University have vouched for Health Saving Accounts plus tax credits. Doctors should not have to seek licensures from every state where they practice. The American Medical Association should discontinue instituting arbitrary barriers to the number of doctors who can practice medicine.
Allen should review the disastrous results of single-payer systems in Canada, Great Britain, France, and other countries whose experiments with expansive government involvement in medicine have become costly failures. Health care needs major reforms in this country, but not with more government, and definitely not with Obamacare.
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