Since I began my professional career I have experienced several years where I had no Medical insurance whatsoever. Over half of the time I was in College I had no medical insurance. And even when I had coverage it was not really protection it was an HMO. If a bad enough ailment had hit me during one of these periods in my life I might not even be alive right now. Guaranteed health care is not a luxury, it is the only responsible course of action a government can take to protect their citizens.
I am in favor of a National Health Care system that guarantees every citizen full medical coverage. Why do we not have one already ? It is clearly the right thing to do. That is simple. Lobbyist for the AMA, hospitals and drug companies spend lots of money to keep it from happening. The reasoning is quite clear. With a Federal health care system they all make less money. This is an example of the downside of Capitalism. You do not want your recovery from an illness to be evaluated based on cost effectiveness. What this means is that HMO’s are NOT acceptable excuses for medical care. Rather than try and address the symptom (cut costs by giving sub standard service – the HMO way), I am in favor of addressing the cause. Let’s give scholarships to people to be Doctor’s who are not in it for the money. Let’s support drug companies that specialize in finding ways to make their product available to the public at reasonable costs. Let’s examine why the AMA has outlawed low cost procedures on allergies and cancer and if we find that these procedures have been banned in the US because it would not be cost effective to the AMA’s constituency (i.e. allergies and cancer are perpetual ailments if they were to be cured the patients would not return and the cycle of income to the doctor’s and drug companies would stop) then we need to take action to fix the problem.
A side effect of this program would be the elimination of the need for a medical portion of automobile insurance. I am not in favor of automobile insurance because it is just a form of programmed inflation. If everyone is covered for medical care by the federal government then the need for medical insurance in other areas will be eliminated.