I’d like to apologize to the readers for neglecting the column last week; I had some family obligations that took my attention. Specifically, my grandfather was in the hospital. I’ll spare you the most intimate, gory details of what happened to the old man, but I can’t resist the opportunity to touch on the state of health care in our nation, specifically in southern California.Grandps was actually released from the hospital on Wednesday, but not because his problem was solved. They drained his bladder (for the first time in three days) and sent him home with a prescription for painkillers and a urine bag, pending surgery that was yet to be scheduled.
A Democrat would look at his predicament and conclude that the way to solve the problem is to expand Medicare or create some new entitlement. The liberal solution would be to legislate some new program or requirement, to address one specific, known problem or set of problems, and then to declare victory. Hooray; prostate patients, you need never worry again, because Medicare has bumped your affliction up on the priority list.
Big-hearted and well-intentioned, as most liberal ideas are, but foolish and counter-productive (as most liberal ideas are).
The real rub with America’s medical system is not a lack of guarantees of care, it’s the opposite. It’s an excess of guarantees, which are made by an organization (the government) that is nowhere near as efficient as fulfilling them as would be the free market.
Even the moderate intrusion of the government into the arena of health care that we have today distorts the market. Example: Medicare. The state takes over responsibility to pay for care for a huge demographic, and in doing so, it mandates that providers perform their services at whatever the state is willing to pay.
How many brains does it take to figure out that when you cap prices, all you do is guarantee that the best level of care that ANYBODY can get is the level of care that EVERYBODY can afford? Result: a shortage of providers.
And my granddad – who is not rich, but could definitely pay free-market rates for the care he needs – gets to sit at home for another three weeks, trying not to die while he waits for his scheduled surgery date.
Here’s another example, one that should speak to everybody in southern California who’s ever been in a car accident or sliced their hand open cutting an onion: Emergency rooms.
If you go to an emergency room, you cannot be denied care, even if you can’t pay. That’s the law. As a result, emergency rooms are the biggest money-losing departments of any hospital. And what happens when things become unprofitable? They go away. Emergency rooms close down. So even people who could afford to pay free-market rates for emergency care end up finding out – usually at the worst possible time – that it’s damn near impossible to get.
For all you “fairness” people out there, chew on this: the crippling distortion of the free market caused by creeping socialism is NOT FAIR to people who are willing and able to pay market prices.
Hey: If you’re some smug, “progressive” pseudo-intellectual driving around in a piece of shit Subaru with a four-footed Darwin fish on the back, think about that for a second. Shouldn’t “survival of the fittest” apply to economic quandaries as well??
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This past Tuesday was April Fool’s day, and I saw an article in the Los Angeles Times that, at first glance, I could have sworn was a joke…
Until I read further.
In the words of David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer:
The Los Angeles City Council dropped plans Tuesday for a symbolic moratorium on
killing, deciding instead to use the upcoming anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s assassination to promote peace.
Council members had been
asked by a handful of activists to declare a 40-hour ban on murder and other
violence, a concept one critic quickly derided as "silliness."
“Silliness”? I understand that parliamentary etiquette requires civil language, but I think that a more appropriate descriptor for that idea is “complete fucking idiocy.”
A forty-hour ban on murder.
Call me a cynic, but don’t we already have an ongoing ban on murder? Isn’t that called “the LAW”?
This idea could only make sense to the same small brains who think that tightening gun controls – which only ever results in taking guns away from law-abiding people – will solve gun crime.
If you have a problem enforcing laws, then you need an enforcement solution. More legislation will not help.
"I'm sure that the people who are doing the killing will hear that the council
is calling for a moratorium and then cease and desist," said a sarcastic Joe
Hicks, a former executive director of the city's Human Relations Commission.
"It's more silliness from our wonderful City Council."
Councilman Tony
Cardenas responded angrily, telling his colleagues that a murder moratorium is
not silly at all.
"That's the kind of attitude that Martin Luther King
had to step over and step across to get the job done," he said.
I don’t even know what to say to that. If I were Dr. King, I would be insulted that some LA City Council half-wit had affixed my name and my legacy to such hollow stupidity.
Here’s an idea: how about the LA City Council impose on itself a forty-hour moratorium on demagoguery, meaningless symbolism, and waste?
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