November, 2007
HillaryCare: You Get What You Pay For
Johnathan Lott
A first hand account of the horrors of socialized healthcare.
Unlike almost everyone else at UF, who benefit from either their parent’s healthcare policies or from the University’s affordable insurance and free health services, I have actually had an experience with socialized medicine. And contrary to what Michael Moore and most Congressional Democrats will tell you, it’s terrible.
I went to Italy on a seemingly harmless Latin Club trip after my junior year of high school. And, of course, I managed to have the only freak incident of the trip. I contracted a mild case of Bell’s palsy, a (Thank God) temporary facial nervous disorder which essentially paralyzes half of the face for about 3 weeks, if properly treated. In addition to ruining my trip and half of my summer, the incident did give me a chance to see a socialized Italian hospital. The hospital was, quite honestly, terrible, although I’m told that it’s one of the finest in Rome. The wait time was about 3 hours in the dead of night to treat something that we had already diagnosed through contact with American doctors. The waiting room was pretty much empty, yet the conditions were horrendous. One man in the emergency room collapsed onto the floor, and it took over 10 minutes for anyone to come pick him up. Once they finally saw me, they took me through a giant ward, which was quite scary. Beds were crunched together, patients were exposed to one another’s illnesses, and there was no privacy whatever for the patients. Upon reaching the doctor’s office, 1 doctor and 2 interns saw me and managed to figure out that “Bell’s Palsy” and “Palsi di Bell” are the same thing, and painfully administered a shot into my gluteus. The whole experience was terrifying, and I was quite thankful that I hadn’t been there for a serious illness or extended stay. I also couldn’t help but notice how much better our American hospitals are.
Why is this? Because you get what you pay for. That’s why American hospitals are, in fact, better than other hospitals. They’re outrageously expensive, which is what gives them the technology and resources to provide excellent health care. Government-funded foreign hospitals, plagued by the budget problems and bureaucratic inefficiencies that characterize governmentfunded projects, provide health care services accordingly.
People don’t seem to realize that health care is not a right that is guaranteed by government. Our government is mandated to provide only three things to its citizenry – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Health care doesn’t fall under any of these three categories (including life). The government’s job is to provide the right to live to its citizens – the right to pursue life to your own ends, a life that is not hindered by the actions of others. This does not include the “right” to extend natural life by scientific methods. While modern health care is a wonderful thing for humanity, governments are not obligated to provide it. This is something that people must do on their own accord. Governments are not (or should not be) set up to take care of the people, only to give the people the means to take care of themselves.
That said, health care is simply a product like any other. It is a very important, very useful product, but a product nonetheless. Because it is so important, it has a ridiculously high demand. The only way to supply enough to meet this demand is by providing companies with incentive to produce a great amount of product – a gratuitous amount of money. In economics, this is a perfect example of the law of supply. Because prices are so high, we are able to have huge supplies of drugs and hospitals to meet our nation’s ridiculous demand. In other countries, when governments take over health care and create price ceilings and red tape which limit supply, demand exceeds supply and shortages occur. These shortages are reflected in long wait times and subpar facilities, exactly what I’ve witnessed firsthand.
And yes, it’s true that some people in fact cannot afford expensive health insurance and HMOs. That’s why we have backups against the expensive drugs. We have free clinics and health departments which provide necessary services to everyone. They help people against life-threatening illnesses and immunize against illnesses which can adversely affect entire populations. We also have need-based Medicare and Medicaid programs to ensure that the poorest people have the means necessary to sort out their illnesses and seize every opportunity to bring themselves up in society. No one in America is “without healthcare,” some simply have more of it than others, which is exactly the way it is with any other product in the world.
So don’t listen to what Hillary Clinton and her slew of Democratic puppets have to say about free healthcare. You do, in fact, get what you pay for, and health care is something that’s important enough to pay the price for. I’ll take my expensive pills and hospital trips over disgusting, diseaseridden wards any day.
If you do want to collapse in an emergency room only to have medics scrape you off the ground in a stretcher ten minutes later, then please, vote for Hillary in the Democratic Primary in January.