Health Care Questions for Election Day
By Richard E. Ralston
October 23, 2006
Voters base their decisions in the voting booth on many issues and on the perceived character of the candidates. Sound health care policy, based on individual freedom and personal choice, should pay an increasingly important role in the political process, and voters need to think through health care issues as an important component of their decisions.
Voters should ask themselves a few basic questions to help formulate their views on health care policy.
Is it a comforting thought that someone else—anyone else—should be responsible for paying for your health insurance? If so, is it a comforting thought that you must pay for everyone else's health insurance?
The cost of health care is a cause for great concern. If cost is the problem, should you realistically expect that the federal government can be the solution? Or a state government such as California? What is there about the history of the last century or so of government spending that would lead you to believe that the government can control spending on health care—or anything else?
Has government spending on such programs as Medicare and Medicaid in the last forty years grown slowly and reasonably under tight and efficient management? Or has it grown explosively in excess of all projections?
The California legislature passed a bill this year that would have eliminated all private insurance in California in favor of a single mandatory insurance program—although voters had rejected such a program in a referendum only a few years ago. Had not the governor vetoed the bill, Californians who receive tax-free health insurance from their employers would have had their plans replaced with a tax of 11.95% of their income—plus a tax on their employers. Would you want your insurance replaced with a new 11.95% income tax? Would you want no choice of insurance policies or coverage options, and instead a single insurance program mandated by the government?
Health Savings Accounts are the most popular innovation in insurance history and are rapidly growing. Yet some candidates in California and other states propose legislation that would eliminate them. If you have a Health Savings Account or would like the option, do you want to see them eliminated?
In California some candidates of both major parties advocate placing hundreds of new government-run health clinics in elementary schools. Would you prefer to have your children treated in government clinics, without your involvement, or by your family physician, with your involvement? Do you think that the public schools are doing such a great job at educating children that they should take on the added responsibility of managing their health care? Should you keep your children home when they are sick—or send them to school because they are sick?
In Canada private insurance is still largely forbidden. Canadians wait an average of 17 weeks for referral to a specialist—some of them much longer. They wait up to two years for elective surgery. They often wait months for an MRI or other scanning. Would you want to wait that long for treatment? Last year the Canadian Supreme Court struck down the law against private insurance in Quebec because "access to a waiting list does not constitute access to health care." Would you want to have to get a court order to receive treatment because your only source of health care is the government?
In recent years, patients of the National Health Service in Great Britain have been denied heart bypass surgery if they are smokers. Would you want to be denied surgery if you are a smoker? Overweight patients have been denied hip and knee replacement surgery because their outcomes are not as good as others on the long waiting lists. Would you want to be denied hip or knee replacement just because you are too fat? This year it was reported that patients 80 years and older were no longer receiving treatment for strokes. Would you want to be denied treatment because you are too old? That is how health care can be rationed when government controls it all.
If you are concerned that the government can track your phone calls, or that the I.R.S. knows every detail of your professional lives and your investments, do you want the government to control the computer records of every detail of your health care?
In your heart, do you have complete trust in government and politicians to provide for your health? Do you really want the care and ownership of your body to be absorbed entirely and exclusively into the loving arms of the government?
—Just a few questions to consider when you vote.
Richard E. Ralston is Executive Director of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine.
Copyright © 2006 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved.
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