Universal / Centralized Health Care
From the outset, let me make it clear that I believe that all Americans deserve health care. Children should not go without medical attention- no one should. Having said that one issue is how it will be financed and there has been the most attention on this. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria did an excellent segment on what we could learn from other countries about health care outlining their experiences. I will not explore health care financing. Enough has been said about it and I am hardly qualified to expound on this topic. What is missing, I think, is commentary about how ANY centralized form of health care could survive- being administered in a nation of our size.
Looking at models from Taiwan or Europe, for example, is most helpful, but, in the end they have nowhere near the logistic issues that we have here in the U.S. Our population is much more diverse from a religious base culturally, politically, financially, ethnically and racially. While English is our primary language, Spanish and many others are employed regionally. Our geography is immense and spans large cities, small towns and remote rural and mountain communities. We are, proudly I should say, a patchquilt. To attempt to manage the health of our diverse population centrally is utter madness. Centrally managed, Medicare’s success, I am sure, will not endure as our senior population expands with information age boomers who are much more independent and less prone to be herded or follow rules and regulations as today’s seniors do.
I am not sitting to the right or the left, but, as many Americans I am frightened what the future will portend with more central management. Bill Maher often summons up models of European success. My argument is NOT that we need universal care, but, in country of our diversity how do we make that happen? We can NOT replicate smaller countries. Central control of universal health care in America will be much more costly than promised. It will not allow creative administrators and doctors to reengineer medical care- consistent with THEIR regions needs, politics and requirements. It does not allow them to create the standards of care specific to their needs.
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