First, she illustrates her profound concerns about this bill with a very instructive analogy.
Secondly, she explains in greater detail the likely consequences of government mandates.
Back in August, I also contributed my own comments to the Live Journal discussion, and I think they still largely apply, so I've copied and pasted them after the jump.
*****
Last night in a private entry, I related my own experience as a formerly uninsured American:
I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, but since many folks on President Obama's side of the issue seem to believe that people's personal experiences with national health care constitute an argument, let me throw in my own experience in the American system. Because you see, for some years, I was an uninsured American with a chronic debilitating illness and a quite meager salary - and not once was I denied care. Indeed, the hospital, my rheumatologist, and even "big pharma" pulled out all the stops to give me the treatment that I genuinely needed: my biologic medication was sent to me completely gratis by Abbot, the vast majority of my hospital debt was forgiven (I paid the rest on a manageable installment plan), and my own physician offered everything from free cortisone injections to free prescription meds. Indeed, I was told that the medical school in my area was willing to perform free abdominal surgeries on needy patients. The only catch was this: my mother and I had to speak up and formally request help from said entities. The upshot: American medical professionals, who generally do care about helping people - yes, even those eeeevil pharmaceutical companies - seem to be willing to step up when you document true need. Nothing in my (admittedly limited, yet distinctly relevant) experience suggests that any reputable American hospital would let a child languish with cancer because her parents can't pay the bills. Something would be done. After all, what is St. Jude?
I believe many people have a distorted apprehension of who the uninsured are. I was uninsured for most of 2003 and then from the end of 2004 to the end of 2006. Why? In the former case, I was unemployed; in the latter, I had switched to my current job (which I love) with a small company that does not offer health benefits. These gaps were due to my personal choices; in the second situation especially, I knew what I was getting into. And as I explained above, I was okay; it was sometimes an enormous pain in the butt to hit up various charitable programs and set up installment plans, but my rheumatoid arthritis was treated. Ultimately, after a series of hospitalizations in 2006, I decided to get an individual plan with a ridiculously high deductible to cover the catastrophes, but due to said deductible, I still pay for my routine arthritis treatments out-of-pocket. I suppose you could say that even now, I am only partially insured - but I continue to do okay for all of the reasons outlined above.
How many of the "uninsured" are just like me, I wonder? How dynamic is this class? How many of the forty million are people in career transition or people who are self-employed? I think this question needs to be answered; I think it's very disingenuous to assume that there is absolutely no choice in play here. I chose my current lot - and I put on my big-girl pants every month and shell out 25-30% of my income (which is not much, just in case you are keeping score) to keep all of my moving parts in halfway functional order. I suppose that's why I sometimes feel the urge to call the waaaaambulance on privileged (and insured) liberals who get moist-eyed over the uninsured. We are not all indigents with poor, malnourished children who have been sucker-punched by the system. Indeed, in my state, the very poor - especially those with dependent children - can already get aid. Perhaps what liberals say is true - perhaps this aid is inadequate. I'm willing to discuss how we can shore up the baseline benefits for the lower working class, the disabled, and the like. But that's not what most liberals want to discuss. What they want is a full-on universal entitlement for people like me - people who have elected to remain uninsured or partially uninsured - as well as the populations who really do need to have a safety net in place. They want a European style system in which everyone is in on the government plan (except for the rich, who will always have the wherewithal to do whatever they want regardless of the left-wing's idolization of "equality").
Why? Because most liberals simply don't believe in the concept of personal responsibility. This is perfectly encapsulated by how an individual on my friends list mischaracterized the observations of the originator of this thread. I read through the entire thread, and what I understood was this: the poster was arguing for at least a modicum of individual accountability. S/he quite rightly pointed out that not all people are poor and/or uninsured through zero fault of their own. S/he also pointed out, as did pat_t below, that many people simply just can't be arsed to take proper care of themselves despite all the hand-holding in the world. On the other hand, s/he also repeatedly acknowledged that there are some populations that really do need a hand up and overall seemed entirely open to the opposing viewpoints of those who responded. Now how did the aforementioned member of my reading list summarize his/her viewpoint? "Poor and disadvantaged people deserve to get the consequences of their "failure" good and hard." This is not even in the same neighborhood as the correct interpretation.
It's very difficult sometimes to remain Christian and not nurse the desire to throttle some people.
Let's lay this out in very stark terms: leftists believe that the man who spends his days and nights strung out on heroin and crack is not any more responsible for his poverty than the immigrants in my parish who speak only a smattering of English and thus struggle to get by on the thin wages accrued from menial - but honorable - service labor. Leftists further believe that people like me - people with computers and cars - are entitled to take from their neighbors' pockets simply because they are technically - and often by choice - uninsured. This is a universe in which the sky is green and grass is pink. There is a difference - a very real difference - between each of the above three classes of people.
Again and again, leftists - particularly European leftists - demonstrate that they are completely disconnected from reality. "We Brits are good at standing in queues!" one cheerily quipped in the replies to another left-wing European friend's post on American health care. When I stumbled upon this, I was frankly gobsmacked; it was like reading a dispatch from another planet. Such a comment demonstrates that some folks on the other side of the pond have become so inured to the hassles of their respective systems that they either can't or won't make the leap of imagination necessary to understand why so many Americans are resistant to Obama's national health care project. "The private health care business is alive and well in the UK," another commenter notes. And you have not mulled over what that might indicate? "Insurance companies ration care too!" another, thinking herself clever, points out. There's just one problem with that line of argument: we can shop around for private insurance. We can even sue our insurance companies if it comes to that. Will we be able to sue an American NHS? "Obama Care did not sanction 'death panels'." Okay - even if we grant that this was not the original intent of the end-of-life counseling elements of the bill, what are we to make of the Oregon cases cited by reality_hammer here? Can you really assure us that the federal government will not interfere with our end-of-life decisions in this manner? Really? "We should treat smarter," intone Obama and his supporters. And what qualified you people to make that determination? "Preventative care for everyone will save money." Except the CBO, if Krauthammer's column is accurate, apparently doesn't think so. "Health care is a human right!" That may be so, but in reality, health care also costs money. That is the nature of the fallen world we live in. Thus, it behooves us to take the time to think soberly about the matter and devise a plan that will actually work. What we should not do is ram entitlement behemoths down the throats of a largely unwilling populace.
We are dealing with a classic clash between what Thomas Sowell terms the anointed and the benighted classes. Those in the anointed class believe that if they can dream up a lofty, "compassionate" ideal that satisfies cosmic notions of social justice, they should be allowed to implement that ideal, by God, and the potential costs be damned. Those of us in the benighted class realize the truth: option A may seem more cosmically "just," but if we can't implement it without doing tremendous damage to our livelihoods, our liberty, our human dignity, and/or our chances for salvation, we are morally obligated to settle for the less-than-perfect option B. Perfection is only achievable in heaven.
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