The Patriot Post® · Health Care for Men or Boys?

By Howard Sachs, M.D.

The great Dr. Thomas Sowell summarized it best. He said the biggest difference between the average man of the Left and individuals with American values is that the latter directs his life with mature questions. The former avoids them like a child. The mature man asks three things: 1) At what cost? 2) Compared to what? And 3) What hard evidence do you have? The man, or rather boy, of the Left asks, “What makes me feel warm, good and squishy inside?”

Let’s take the health care debate raging on Capitol Hill these days. On the leftist (Democratic) side there are only little boys and girls at play. They tell us it makes them feel super-duper good to give everybody health care because we are all humans and we have rights. After all, there are lots of rich people who don’t deserve the money they have honestly earned and we can take it away and give it to others more deserving. And like the man over the speakers at the Democratic Convention said, “We all share one thing in common, and that is Government. Hence, Mom and Daddy Government will give us the stuff we need and deserve — all the great medicines, hospitals and well-trained doctors we could ever want.” It’s the old and warn story from Marx, to Mao, Hugo, Fidel and now Barack and Chuck.

Well, back on planet earth, there are still some mature American men and women leaders still about the halls of Congress trying to bring some maturity and reality to the situation — people like Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Ron Paul; people who long ago left the nursery. These are the Americans who face Dr. Sowell’s questions face on and try to guide us all into a semblance of an adult world. They ask the three questions about socialized medicine, namely Obamacare or Paul Ryan’s Obamacare Lite vs. a free market medical system. The answers are clear, but just because there are answers and just because we can stare reality in the face does not mean our leaders will accept this or lead us along the right path. The call of the child is always with us. That little boy or girl inside of us all is always there — “take care of me mom and dad. Take care of me you kind caring folks in government. Give me the free stuff I deserve. It makes me feel so warm and comforted knowing the folks on Capitol Hill will be there to give me the health care I want and deserve. I will vote for you again and again if you just care for little ole me.” And on and on, societies choose the route of the child, socialism, and then go on to implode.

I have been working in medicine for over 30 years in both the government-socialized world like the VA and in the private one (or what is barely left of it). What I can say about the two worlds is they define the boundaries between the child and man. When costs, comparisons and hard evidence are taken into account, only a foolish child or a child in a man’s body would choose the path of socialism, maintaining Obamacare or simply tweaking it. The socialized world is the world of high costs — high costs of money, costs of time, costs of waste, costs of loss of liberty, loss of choice, loss of excellence, loss of initiative. When you hand a person a Medicaid, Medicare or ObamaCare card and say “go get it boys and girls; you are human. Government is here to give you your healthcare,” you get a wreck — just like the wrecks of socialized anything throughout history.

Take the money we spend each year now on an almost socialized health care system. I see every day, year after year, the utter, deplorable waste. Millions upon millions of people have expensive tests and procedures they really don’t need or would choose not to have if they had to reach into their own pockets and pay for them. Can you imagine what we might do with the waste each year of three, four or five hundred billion dollars? All the new drugs we might discover? All the profit that would be there to incentivize great men and women to go into medicine? All the beautiful clinics and hospitals we might build? All the scientists and engineers who might profit from great work? All the deserving poor we might be able to care for? All the non-medical business that might be created to employ our people?

It’s pretty simple but not simplistic. The 3 o'clock socialized Amtrak train from DC runs $180 for me to travel to Penn Station in Manhattan. On the other hand, the 3 p.m. private, clean, fast, efficient Vamoose bus with WiFi and fine air conditioning runs $50 and gets me there just as fast. If Ms. Pelosi or Sen. Schumer want a brain MRI done of themselves on a socialized scanner in Fairfax, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from their offices on Capitol Hill. It will run about $2,000. The same scan done in a state with still some semblance of a free market will run maybe a quarter of that at $500.

But our children in grown up bodies up on Capitol Hill think they are pulling the wool over the eyes of most Americans with their warm and fuzzy words about the beauty of socialized Medicine — single payer, Obamacare or now Obamacare Lite. They are not. Out beyond the Beltway there are still millions of us who are strong, free, mature Americans who know the answer to Dr. Sowell’s questions. The answer is we know socialism is horrible, immoral, unkind, and destructive. We reject it. But we know the enlightened ones up on the Hill, now empowered in ways our Founders never could envision, likely will continue to ram it down our throats and thereby continue the deep decline of this great American experiment. Ronald Reagan was certainly right. The government is not the solution; it is the problem. And until this leviathan-sized government is brought down again to the size it was intended (likely through the only way available — the Convention of States), we will continue to spiral into decline. Brace yourselves for even more of DMV medicine.