Posted by
darrel on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 1:21:11 PM
Thanks to Thomas Sowell for the inspiration for this column
Like caring for your family sedan is necessary in order to keep it running right, caring for your individual health is also required in order to enjoy the benefits of life. Sometimes it is necessary to take your car to an experienced mechanic to fix a problem that you can’t deal with personally, and it is also necessary to visit a medical professional on occasion in order to solve a problem that you have little or no knowledge about.
By doing regular upkeep, like oil changes and some lubrication, changing spark plugs when necessary, or replacing a fan belt or radiator hose, maintaining a good finish on the exterior of the car, keeping tires inflated to the proper pressure, and numerous other small but necessary jobs, an individual can avoid taking his car to the dealer or mechanic, thus saving money that is needed elsewhere.
The dealer or mechanic will still have all of the work they can handle with major things like engine overhauls, body and fender repair, transmission replacements, and other major problems that the average car owner either can’t do or doesn’t have the tools for. It is required, in order to stay in business, that the dealers or mechanics charge a fee that allows them a profit so that they will be there the next time you need their services, plus allow them to make a decent living.
Medical care works pretty much on the same order. Much of what the medical profession treats today are regular maintenance problems that could have and should have been taken care of by the individual. In the same manner as not abusing your car and expecting it to continue to perform as advertised, an individual cannot continue to abuse his or her body and expect it to continue to function as designed by our Creator. There are some things that require the need of a professional human being mechanic; that is one who works on the problems of our bodies that we can’t work on ourselves. Like the mechanic or dealer who must make a profit in order to be there when we really need them, the medical professionals also need to show a profit in order to be there when needed.
We are now told that we must have universal health care, meaning in reality, universal medical care, since health care is your responsibility, not your doctor’s. We are told that everybody must have this universal coverage or be fined.
When someone is forced to take on something that they don’t want, like medical coverage insurance, there is a very real possibility that it is going to be over used and abused. Doctors and hospitals will be even more overwhelmed than they now are, and care will be diminished while costs will necessarily rise for the service. Rising costs do not mean that hospitals and doctors will be reimbursed accordingly, as the cost for each procedure will be determined by the medical care provider; our loving government.
If the same applied to your auto mechanic, and he could not charge the rates necessary to maintain a profit, he would soon go out of business, leaving you to look for another mechanic. The same situation will apply to hospitals and doctors when they cannot maintain a profit. Those now studying to be doctors will choose some other field instead, and hospitals overcome with increasing costs and no way to cover them, will have to close.
Also, imagine that when your neighbor takes his car to the dealer or a mechanic for a service that once cost one hundred dollars, and now there was a law that said that service would only be compensated for to the tune of fifty dollars by the government plan, and on top of that, you would have to chip in to pay for your neighbor’s service. Would you stand for that? I think not, so why should you stand for the same circumstance in the medical care business?
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, an old saying tells us, but even though the system may be in need of repair to some degree, central government is breaking it even more, making it totally unusable for all.