Westmiller on Medical Care

Medical Care

The fear of illness or injury is a basic human instinct. Leaving our future well being in the hands of government bureaucrats would be a fatal mistake.

The problem with any government insurance is that it restricts every citizen's choices, punishes those who make good life decisions and provides minimal services at maximum prices. For those reasons, and the separation of powers required by the 10th Amendment, the federal government should quickly eliminate barriers to private market options and charitable institutions.
Insurance is a service that allows consumers to offset future risks from current expenditures. Individuals are able to judge their needs and costs against the potential risks and expense of future treatment. No government program can make those judgements for each individual, nor can it monitor the value or propriety of individual treatments. Instead, it sets a fixed, compulsory fee and treatment norms that are beyond the control of physicians or patients.
Medical Savings Accounts provide a flexible alternative to government programs. Individuals would be allowed to contribute, tax free, to a designated account for medical services. Inexpensive catastrophic insurance would cover the most extreme medical emergencies, but all other services would be fee-for-service payments from the account. Individuals would be free to select their medical provider and the treatments they prefer.
Several reforms can forestall the worst aspects of government programs. Federal government auditors have found a 40% fraud rate in the Medicare program. As an interim step, patients (or their guardians) should be required to 'check off' any treatments prior to billing. In many cases, patients have no idea that Medicare is being billed for services they didn't request and didn't receive.
Almost 70% of Medicaid expenses occur when physicians go to extremes to postpone inevitable death. In many cases, these extremes are contrary to wishes of patients and family, causing extreme emotional trauma and prolonged pain. Patients should have the right to die with dignity and chose natural death over mechanical vegetation.
Little by little, government proponents are implementing the government "health" program roundly rejected by citizens only a few years ago. Physicians are being forced to commit to government financing for two years and reject all their fee-for-service patients. Hospitals and HMOs are being required to extend and add services without compensation. Bad law by small steps is no better, and less honest, than the original statist proposal.
The most perverse element of government medicine is that legislators consider it an act of kindness to extend every benefit and service to recipients, without considering the cost. What they sow are the seeds of generational war and an insatiable desire to get something for nothing, at the expense of ever taxpayer.