• Health-care reform and the mixed economy
• What the “Affordable Health Care for America Act,” HR 3962, Actually Says
• How to stop losing the health-care debate

(HT Diana Hsieh)

Dear Senator {Your Senator} –

I am thoroughly disgusted with your vote in favor of the health care bill.

The lives and health of Americans depend on freedom in medicine. We need politicians willing to see that government controls, regulations, and welfare are the source of today’s high-cost, bureaucratic medicine — and brave enough to advocate for repeal.

Instead, we have you and your pork-loving, vote-buying, economic-illiterate, moral-degenerate, freedom-destroying colleagues in the Senate.

Shame on you. You all deserve to be voted out of office as soon as possible.

In Utter Disgust,

{Your Name}

Find your senator here and let ‘em have it.

When government-run “competitors” are funded by tax revenues, and immune to the same economics and regulations that the freer-market is subject to, the real competition is eliminated.

Phase two is much worse.

The remaining “only option” is a dysfunctional charade of entrenched mediocrity immune to the requirement of customer satisfaction - essentially like our “only option” public schools. Except that in the case of health care, financial negligence, social engineering, lowering standards, and stifling innovation (all hallmarks of socialized endeavors) will cause more immediate loss of life instead of the living death imposed by socialized education.

Most of the irrationality spewed in congress is standard vote-buying rhetoric lacking of intellectual substance, and unworthy of mention; but occasionally there are statements which justice demands we challenge.

How about this humdinger from Alan Grayson:

I have a friend of a friend (also an opponent of socialized medicine), whose four siblings were gassed to death in the Holocaust, who could offer a slightly different perspective for Mr. Alan Grayson.

There is only one aspect where his obscene analogy holds any hint of merit - the current state of American medicine is indeed a state-sponsored effort destroying life and prosperity.

But, we all know that’s not what he’s referring to.

His implication is that not having someone else pay for your healthcare is the moral equivalent of being persecuted, enslaved and murdered, and that anyone who opposes socialized medicine is guilty of such. This classless bureaucrat equates the burden of self-reliance with facing genocide. This incredible statement, intended as an argument from intimidation, is a complete moral inversion and a slap in the face of any human being who values life.

Even in the political cesspool resulting from today’s cultural rot, for a political figure expected to convey character, integrity, honesty, and intelligence, to so carelessly diminish the most unspeakable evil in modern history is an embarrassingly juvenile feat of malicious ignorance.

This man should offend all Americans and has no business posing as a supposed leader of this country.

Please let him know if you share my sentiments.

Office of Congressman Alan Grayson
455 N. Garland Ave., Ste. 402
Orlando, FL 32801
Phone: (407) 841-1757
Fax: (407) 841-1754

I found noteworthy this passage from Leonard Peikoff’s chapter ‘Medicine: The Death of a Profession’ in The Voice Of Reason:

“The DRG administrator will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don’t—and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO, favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can’t afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won’t authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital—and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can’t get a specialist’s advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn’t even take this patient, he’s so sick—after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges…”

Meanwhile, the patient (maybe you or your loved one) dies…

This hypothetical, but factually warranted, scenario was from a lecture given back in 1985, so imagine if we adjust the cognitive and ethical nightmare presented above to accommodate an additional 25 years of cancerous government involvement. Consider how much worse it will be when the few remaining slivers of freedom are completely ground into the muck of full government control.

Keep in mind the scenario portrayed above, along with the highlighted acronyms, when you next hear some righteous idiot condemn the “free” health care market.

In a free market of healthcare, the only relevant decisions are amongst the physician and the patient to determine the most appropriate course of action available in accordance with the rational judgment and financial means of both parties. Freedom, efficiency, objectivity and justice are the guiding principles one needs when his life is on the line, not subjective deliberation, bureaucratic pandering, systemic injustice and economic dysfunction.

Another variant phrase in support of this:

Suppose one could demonstrably claim increased innovation, lowered costs, and a dramatic universal increase in both quantity (life expectancy) and quality of life – the fact remains that socialized medicine is a system rooted in the wholesale encroachment of individual rights. There is no combination of practical angles that outweigh the moral essence. There is no scope of benevolence reaped by one man or one million that can justify forcefully clobbering a single right of another individual.