Fifty Fallacies About Health Care
By Richard E. Ralston
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33. "Will not the commitment of President Obama in his 2009 address to Congress to eliminate cancer save many lives?" Ask if the increased funding of $2.9 billion to the National Cancer Institute, with President Clinton's commitment to eliminate cancer, eliminated cancer. Ask if President Nixon's commitment to eliminate cancer, with the major new research in the National Cancer Act of 1971, eliminated cancer. Ask why, if government spending can be depended on to eliminate a disease, the President did not pledge new spending to eliminate death.
34. "The government can rapidly cut the cost of health care by mandating electronic medical records." Ask how that will reduce the cost of treatment, medical equipment, drugs, physician services or any other health costs. Ask if the increase of electronic records that has been happening for many years has had any substantial impact on rising costs. Ask how, if all medical records are included into a single, government database, with access available to hundreds of thousands of workers in medicine and related fields, there will be any medical privacy possible. Ask why creating electronic records require that all of your medical records must be turned over to the government without your permission. Ask why the new "national coordinator" will be able to review your records to evaluate and require changes in the treatment recommended by your physician. Ask why this national coordinator will be able to turn your records over to any organization for "research," without your permission, or sell your records to outside businesses for marketing purposes, without your permission, or why the Secretary of Health and Human Services will be able to turn your records over to anyone for any purpose, without your permission. Ask anyone if they think their physician will be able to recommend a treatment for them if inspection of medical records resulted in a rebuke by the national coordinator for providing the same treatment to other patients.
35. "Health care is broken." First ask yourself if you think your own health care is broken. If it is, ask who broke it. If the answer is the regulatory and legislative activity of politicians, ask how they can be trusted to fix it. Ask if the reform they advocate will be in their own political interest or in the interest of the best health care.
36. "Government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid cut medical costs by controlling and reducing reimbursements paid to physicians and hospitals and other providers." Ask what happens when providers are forced to provide services at a rate that does not cover their costs. We have decades of experience with that. They must shift those costs to other patients and private insurers, which increases the cost of health care and insurance for everyone.
37. "Mandatory insurance is the best course of health care policy because it supports individual responsibility." When you hear this, ask if it should also be mandatory to buy a nice house and take out a big mortgage to solve housing problems. Ask if making the lack of insurance into a crime has anything to do with individual responsibility. Ask how destroying individual rights supports responsibility. Ask if the purchase of something is made mandatory, will that make it cheaper, or more expensive. Ask if politicians who use the force of law to require you to buy health insurance will be able to resist micro-managing exactly what such insurance must cover. Ask how special interests will use the mandate to make contributions to politicians and lobby to add more coverage requirements for their benefit. Ask why politicians, like former Senator John Edwards, also want to require, through such mandates, that everyone get specific examinations. Ask how such requirements will be enforced and what it will do to the privacy of medical records. How does being forced by the government to do things increase individual responsibility? Why not encourage freedom?
38. "The government should require the computerization of all medical records, which should then be made available to the government to ensure their privacy." Ask why the same people that are terrified (perhaps with justification) of the government intercepting some international phone calls have no problem with giving the government every personal detail of your medical history.
39. "We need Universal Health Care." The best response to whatever that means is that "Universal Freedom" is the best and only effective means to maintain our health, our lives and anything else that we value.
40. "We need to trust the government to provide us with the best medical care." Ask if we really trust the loving arms of government to provide us with the best medical care. Ask if government health care does not often turn into political health care, to serve the spoils system of politicians and provide service primarily to those special interests with political pull.
41. "Only government can reduce the cost of health care." Ask why every government health care system in the world reduces cost only by reducing the availability of health care and increasing rationing and the time spent on waiting lists for referral to specialists, diagnosis and treatment, and by denying access to some medications, testing and treatment completely.
42. "People need health care, so health care is a right that must be provided to them by others." The response must be that everyone has a right to seek health care, to make their own decisions about it, and even to ask others for it if they can't get it. But no one has a right to anyone else's life.
43. "Health care spending can be reduced by providing insurance to everyone, because costs now incurred by the uninsured will no longer be passed along to the rest of us." Ask how those savings can be achieved without spending as much or probably more to pay for the insurance.
44. "Health care spending can be reduced by mandating that everyone buy insurance." Ask, if this is true, why mandatory insurance in Massachusetts resulted in rapidly increasing spending beyond all projections. Ask why Medicare, which is mandatory for all Americans, has seen rapidly increased spending beyond all expectations, has $36 trillion in unfunded liabilities and is rapidly running out of money.
45. "The State Children's Health Program is necessary to provide children with health care." Ask why it is necessary to move millions of children who have private insurance into a government program, if not to make them dependent on politicians handing out benefits. Ask why the program slips in restrictions on opening more efficient specialty hospitals, if not to protect the special interest of large hospital empires. Ask how the program will be funded once income from the tax on a rapidly diminishing pool of smokers runs out.
46. "A Federal Health Board is required to control expense and require better health care." Nearly one hundred years ago the Federal Reserve System with a Federal Reserve Board was established to insure a stable money supply and eliminate recessions, depressions, inflation, and unemployment. Ask how the Federal Reserve Board has done with that. Ask why we should expect more of a Federal Health Board. Based on experience, what could possibly go wrong?
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