Want more government control on health care?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=15945
Medicare should be scrapped, eventually
Posted: October 16, 2000
1:00 am Eastern

By Jon E. Dougherty
© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com



As the Nov. 7 election nears, senior citizens have been treated to a host of Medicare-funded prescription drug plans offered by the candidates of both major political parties.

I have a better idea. Instead of adding another huge, expensive, inefficient and burdensome layer of bureaucracy to the bloated Medicare program, let's just scrap it instead and begin to teach Americans once more how to be self-sufficient and plan for their own retirement.

Crazy? Politically, perhaps, but that's the problem with Medicare in the first place, isn't it? It's too damned political. As long as it stays that way -- which will be forever -- then the program will remain broken, expensive and inefficient.

Think not? Well, consider that Medicare has been a government-run program from the outset. Through the years, has it become better or worse at delivering on its original promise of unfettered, universal health-care coverage for senior citizens?

I dare say if it was getting better, both major party candidates wouldn't be spending so much time in Florida and elsewhere, trying to explain a new drug benefit package that is simply going to be too expensive on our youth and younger workers in just a few years.

It's free market "cause-and-effect," much like the government's guarantee for student loans. Prices for colleges skyrocketed when politicians began "guaranteeing" loans for college-bound Americans -- as if every American really does "deserve" to go to college or is suited for college.

Speaking of medical care, the "guaranteed payment" principle once applied to hospitals and insurance companies. At one time, patients with any kind of insurance were often admitted to hospitals for dubious and inappropriate conditions. Many didn't require hospitalization, but doctors admitted those patients anyway because they knew insurance companies would simply write a check for the bill. The result? Escalating medical costs and draconian insurance "reform" measures in the mold of problematic HMOs.

Voters should not allow lawmakers to foist yet another burdensome layer of Medicare bureaucracy on our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They won't be able to afford it.

Granting more "subsidies for initial levels of drug spending will only increase incentives to over-use Medicare benefits and increase the cost of prescription drugs," wrote Tom Miller, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, on July 17, in discussing the House Republicans' prescription drug plan.

He's right. Medicare is incapable of being "fixed" as it is. Enlarging it will only make it worse -- and more expensive -- which will eventually cause Uncle Sam to cut it back again, just to "save money." It's a vicious circle, and it's getting us nowhere except further in debt and more reliant on Washington's "generosity." To hell with that.

Medicare was a bad mistake. We can repeat it -- over and over -- or we can scrap a program whose time never came.



Jon E. Dougherty is a Missouri-based writer and the author of "Illegals: The Imminent Threat Posed by Our Unsecured U.S.-Mexico Border."