As usual, what you see on a program with an agenda to make socialized medicine seem an utopia skews the facts or simply ignores them. In Germany, for example, the people are increasingly unhappy to see their mandatory contributions steadily increase - both payroll contributions (13.99%) and their copays, that can range from 15% for some, like drugs, to 100% for others, like dentures.
In a recent survey, almost half (48%) of Germans said they were "dissatisfied," or "very dissatisfied" with the country's mandatory health care system, one of the reasons being long delays for non-emergency treatment, with waits over 12 weeks to even see a specialist, much less get needed surgery. As a result, over 25% of Germans above the income level where they would receive free care still buy private health insurance. If you doubt these figures, PM me and I'll give you the references.
It's easy to talk about how medical insurance could still be handled by insurance companies, but financed by the government. Governments don't "finance" anything; they simply raise taxes to pay for new schemes. When the late First Lady tried to introduce socialized medicine in the 1970s, it was estimated that Hillarycare would have taken over one seventh of the GNP of the country.
Whenever governments finance anything, they insist on assuming a measure of control. For example, Hillarycare would have made it illegal, under penalty of imprisonment, for an individual to pay for, or a provider to supply, private health care outside of the system. The history of government shows that an initially small, "reasonable" measure of control escalates into total authority and micromanagement. And with this comes new departments, bureaucrats and massive staffs with all their expenses. My father, before his retirement, was Chief Administrative Officer for a group of three hospitals. His experience of what happened with centralized government interference in the hospitals, run by the local authority quite satisfactorily for 150 years, mainly funded by private endowments, can be judged from this passage from his memoirs:
"April 3, I was visited by an 'Efficiency Expert' from the Ministry of Health. This young man proudly announced that, prior to entering government service, he had worked in the car industry, involved in something called 'Time and Motion Studies.' By redesigning machines and how men operated them, he had cut down on wasted movement and scrap metal. Apparently he had been studying how the hospitals were being run and was determined to apply the same expertise in 'improving your efficiency.' He also told me that he had studied the activities of nurses, and found that most of them 'wasted time chatting to patients.'
"In vain did I attempt to explain that hospitals bear nothing in common with car plants. For example, in the latter you do not have to keep a piece of metal in a warm, dry and lit place, then explain to it what you intended to do to it, why it needed to be done, and obtain the metal's permission to do it. Nor did you have to have expert staff on hand to save the metal's life if the stamping (e.g.) process went wrong, nor have other trained staff care for it for a week or two after it had been stamped, and have it come back later to have the stamping examined. I also tried to get him to understand that talking to patients was part of their recovery, it was called a 'bedside manner,' and as an efficiency expert he should be aware of the studies that showed how this hastened patients' recovery and shortened their hospital stays."
To reiterate: Governments, almost by definition, are inefficient, bloated and expensive, and rarely do anything as well as private industry can. Someone on the forum said how good Social Security is. Actually, it is one of the greatest ripoffs in history. Remember how it began? I'll omitthe political party responsible for cheating and pillaging - you work it out:
Franklin Roosevelt introduced the Social
Security (FICA) Program. He promised:
1.) That participation in the Program would be
completely voluntary,
2.) That the participants would only have to pay
1% of the first $1,400 of their annual
incomes into the Program,
3.) That the money the participants elected to put
into the Program would be deductible from
their income for tax purposes each year,
4.) That the money would be put into an
independent "Trust Fund" rather than into the
General operating fund and would
only be used to fund the Social Security
Retirement Program, and no other
Government program, and,
5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees
would never be taxed as income.
A really great system, with built-in checks and safety for one's investment.
A truy great leader, FDR, but too trusting.
Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are
now receiving a Social Security check every month and now find
that we are getting taxed on up to 85%
of the money we paid to the Federal government to "put
away," you may be interested in the following:
Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the
independent "Trust Fund" and put it into the
General fund so that Congress could spend it on pork-
barrel projects to ensure their reelection?
A: President L. J. and the XXXX-controlled
House and Senate.
Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax
deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding and
made participation mandatory?
A: The XXXX Party.
Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social
Security?
A: The XXXX Party, in the mid-1990s, with
ZZZZ casting the
"tie-breaking" deciding vote as President of the
Senate, while he was Vice President of the US
Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving
Social Security payments to immigrants who had
paid nothing into the fund?
A: The president (from 1977 to 1981) and the
XXXX Party.
Immigrants coming into this country, at age 65
begin to receive Social Security payments even if
they never paid a dime into it!
Then, after doing all this lying and thieving and violating
of the original contract (FICA), the XXXXs
tell you that the YYYYs want to take your
Social Security away!
Had a private company done half of these things, the managers would have found themselves in jail for 10 years. Social Security takes your money compulsorily, then spends all of it on mainly wasteful pork-barrel projects to ensure the politicians' reelection. What you get is essentially a Ponzi scheme. There is no "Lock Box"; today's recipients are being funded by today's workers, and the net return on your "investment," after inflation, is a negative 3%.
Examples of the government wasting your dollars and screwing up almost everything they touch would fill a book. The Pentagon, almost every year, received billions of dollars more than it asks for or needs. This is so that Congressman A, or Senator B can go back to his constituency in November and tell the gullible how much Defence Dept. business he has brought to the area, or state.
Bureaucracy? Government grows, always, under every administration and party. Anyone who has worked for a state or federal government can tell you that one of the main, if not the main ways of advancing and getting more power and dough is by increasing the size of your department and the number of people who report to you. Reagan promised to trim down government - and it grew under his stewardship. Ditto Clinton. Under Bush II the federal government grew by 60%.
How would this happen in private industry? It wouldn't, or at least not for long My wife worked at G.E. when Jack Welch came in as CEO. In one of his first meetings with division heads, he told them to walk through every department and ask every person what exactly they did; apparently this hadn't happened before, and as a result thousands of drones were let go (earning Welch his sobriquet of "Neutron Jack," after the Neutron Bomb which is supposed to kill people and leave infrastructure intact). He called another meeting a few months later and told each department head that, in six months, his department would be profitable, sold or dismantled. As a result, the electronics went to the French firm Thomson, the large appliances to Hotpoint and the small ones to Black & Decker.
Wouldn't it be great if the government did somethign similar? Dream on.
Waste? Stories appear every week about billions (that's with a B) of dollars that government departments cannot trace or account for. No heads roll. It's only tax money, after all. We need more billions, we just turn the spigot on a bit more.
Inefficiency? Just one example. The agency responsible for cracking down on unfit truck and bus drivers, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, has not even completed one of the eight recommendations that U.S. safety regulators proposed in 2001. Public safety experts have protested this for years, without effect. The G.A.O. released a study by the VA, Labor and Soc. Sec. Depts. last week that - sit down for this - 563,000 commercial drivers are also eligible for full disabilty benefits for epilepsy, heart disease, impaired vision or other health issues. It is estimated that 5,300 people died in crashes involving commercial trucks and buses in 2006, and 126,000 were injured. Apparently nothing has been done because one government dept. won't speak to another.
So, this is the bunch you want to get their fingers into health insurance?
