If you're not perfect you might as well just die -UPDATED

If you're not perfect you might as well just die -UPDATED 2017-03-17T05:45:00+00:00

GM Roper with a powerful post linking to this story on the increasingly narrow terms of health coverage in the UK, where, you know, health care is “free.”

So now, the Democrats want to emulate the English. They claim health care is a right, that the insurance companies are making a fortune, that the poor lack access to health care. Well, insurance companies do fairly well, but then that is because of their investments more than anything. As to the poor lacking access, nonsense, what they lack is insurance. Any person can go to just about any emergency room with just about any complaint and get treatment and never pay a dime for it. What they can’t do, and this is part of a very real problem is make an appointment with a Doc and go to the office. I solve that problem by doing some pro-bono work. I limit it, but I’ll do it because I think it right.

However the Democrats won’t let me have that choice, nor any other health care provider. In England the rationing is already being talked about: In his open letter to doctors, nurses and other health workers, the Prime Minister promises to press on with Tony Blair’s reforms of the NHS, pledging more personalised care for all patients.

He adds: “We will also examine how all these changes can be enshrined in a new constitution of the NHS, setting out for the first time the rights and responsibilities associated with an entitlement to NHS care.”

Well, healthy habits should be encouraged by health care providers, and of course, we all have some responsibility in our health, but for Pete’s Sake, mandated? What ever happened to freedom to choose? Let me give an unlikely, but entirely possible example.” Let’s say you are a smoker, I can understand you being charged more for your insurance, and I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the cost of treatment for a large number of illnesses, and I’m a recovering lung cancer patient. I know what the personal and monitary costs of stupid behavior are up close and personal. But let’s say you are a smoker, you don’t smoke around your children or in your house or car, but your child has asthma. How would you feel if your child was denied care because of the “smell” of smoke on your clothes may (or may not) have contributed to the asthma? Now, anyone with any sense would say wow, active asthma of course I would quit smoking. And yet, some people are absolutely unable to do so.

Do we tell the poor who tend to have more physical illnesses than more wealthy folk “Sorry, your poor choices of food, tobacco, alcohol, fill in the blank have made treatment for you impossible?”

Do we tell the elderly that “Sorry, your age makes you a poor candidate for open heart surgery?”

Do we empty the nursing homes because some of those patients won’t ever get better?

Do we pull a Terri Schiavo on our handicapped because afterall, most handicapps are life long?

I know – I pulled a long excerpt, but do go read the whole thing. It’s important. This issue touches your life and liberty in a million ways.

UPDATE: A great post – with great quotes that illustrate my points:

Writing in the left-wing Liberation newspaper, sociologist Henri Pierre Jeudy suggested the ban marked “the end of an era” for France — and a danger for personal freedoms.

“Public health costs are being used to justify an ever more coercive control over our private lives,” he said, with France’s yen for smoky cafes now cast as “an unhealthy mistake”.

There is no such thing as “free” healthcare. You pay for it, yes, with taxes, but also with incremental decreases in personal liberty.


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