Health Care: A Crisis of Liberty

The recent hullabaloo over health care has created an enormous opportunity for proponents of various social, economic and political theories to spread their particular flavors of propaganda. Media outlets of all flavors and levels of influence have been dominated by these purveyors of disinformation as the conflicting “facts” and “studies” have produced a dizzying array of “must-be-true” pronouncements the likes of which haven’t been seen since the immovable object and the irresistible force.

Ultimately, what has become clear is that while health care is the hot potato being tossed around, the real battle here is one over control. And the “left vs. right” fallacy has served up yet another sideshow to distract us from the real issues at stake: personal freedoms. Both of the two major political parties in the US are waging the same war on liberty, regardless of their platitudes. This becomes clearer by the day, as we are bombarded with hour after hour of what can most politely be described as political horse manure.

What many seem to have forgotten is that we have, in this nation and elsewhere, made health care a nearly impossible puzzle due to the notion that somehow someone other than the patient should pay for it. The origins of this ridiculous idea can be traced back to labor unions who lobbied corporate interests for better conditions for the masses of indentured servants who were forced to appeal to their corporate taskmasters for any and everything. It could arguably be further traced back to more obvious forms of slavery, but that’s probably a discussion for a different day.

As the 20th Century progressed, our need for sophistication had us relabeling these “benefits” as insurance — as if I could be insured for something we all require. Imagine, for example, that someone similarly decided that gasoline for your automobile should somehow be a job benefit and that ultimately you should be required to purchase “gasoline insurance” so that someone else could pay for what you use at the pump. This idea is perhaps a little more obviously so, but no less ridiculous than the idea that I should need health insurance.

Don’t misunderstand me, insurance has its place. Anyone familiar with the basic purpose of insurance — to mitigate the risk of the “unlikely occurence” — can see that coverage for the rare catastrophic situation makes sense. But insurance for the “regular occurrence” is an obvious waste of resources.

Today’s bloated system is one in which the economic buyer of services is not the actual user of the services. And a basic examination of the operations of your average physician’s practice will show just how inefficient this is. The average medical practice employees a team of nearly 5 people per physician, most of whom are only necessary due to the incredible complexity of collecting fees from the 3rd parties who are paying for their customers’ purchases.

In Florida, for example, where something like 80% of the services of the average medical practice are paid for by Medicare, your friendly neighborhood physician has long since ceased to be a business owner and is little more than a government slave. All manner of control is exercised over these public servants by the two forces to which they are enslaved: government payers and pharmaceutical companies. The latter has entered into the game of control by virtue of the fact that they are the only ones in the game whose pockets are actually being deepened by this bloated and out-of-control system. All manner of payola, bribery, and other undue influence is exercised over these well-educated slaves because of the fact that they aren’t in control of their own businesses.

There’s no question that we have a mess on our hands. But the issues of the “uninsured” and of cost-effectiveness can best be solved — as any rational human being looking at the big picture would necessarily conclude — by removing the centralization of control in the system and letting real competition have its way. This means decentralizing the money: taking it out of the hands of government entities and massive insurers and putting back into the hands of the actual healthcare providers. This would permit them to escape the clutches of control exercised by big Pharma and put them back in the business of providing that which they spent so many years being trained to provide: patient care.

There’s no question that a transition from our current mess to a logical free market system is risky and would need to be planned out strategically. But as history has proven time and time again, we are the best masters of our destiny, not those who seek to control.

And that, my friends, is the reason so much blood was shed in the founding of this great nation.