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Republished from Source: Original Article by J D Longstreet Socialized Medicine in the United States! : WesternFront America May 27th, 2009

So the big push has begun! The big push for socialized medicine in the United States. Altho, there is little funny about this boondoggle, it is sorta funny to watch the socialists in the US government, including the Obama Administration, tie themselves into knots to avoid using the words “socialized” and “medicine” in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence. Nevertheless, that is exactly what they are proposing… socialized medicine. And again, I expect ignorance to overcome logic and sound reasoning as the government shoves socialized medicine down the throats of American citizens and, in so doing, bring about the collapse of the best healthcare system in the world.

If you are one of those who actually think they are doing this because they care about you, you really need to see a shrink about your mental health, I mean your “delusions.”

America is about to experience something we have never had before in our history. Rationing of healthcare. There is simply no escaping it. Costs of healthcare will have to be brought to heel by the Obama administration and there is only one way to do that… and that is to ration it. In other words you will be placed on a waiting list and your ailment will be treated whenever they get to you, in a couple of weeks, a couple of months, or a couple of years, or maybe never. If you don’t get the care you require and you die, so much the better. That is the other way of bringing healthcare costs down.”

My wife had surgery a few days ago. The surgery was performed by a robot. Yep! A well-qualified doctor was supervising the robot, of course, but the robot did the work. The machine, we were told, costs 2 million bucks per copy. I pleaded with my wife, in the few minutes we had before she was whisked away to the operating room, to take extreme care, and for goodness sake, do not damage or break that 2 million dollar robot.

The machine is so complicated it sometimes takes hours to set it up between procedures and, as a result, it can only perform two surgeries a day.

It took only a few days, less than a week, to have the paperwork, blood work, radiological workup, and the surgery performed and return home, in my wife’s case. I was left sitting in one of those uncomfortable chairs in an ultra-modern waiting room, surrounded with huge TVs with drive-in movie size screens and stereo sound, plus a progress board, all lit up, and hanging on a wall, showing the progress of your patient in the surgical process as the hours dragged by. Those of us waiting had the option of relaxing in an area of the “pavilion” where hot coffee and snacks were offered. We were given a “beeper and every hour or so, the beeper would go off and someone from the surgical team would come out and bring us up to date on where, exactly, our patient was in the process and how, generally, the patient was tolerating the supreme invasion of a knife, even a knife wielded by a robot.

The kind of “express’ healthcare we experienced and described above, will be a thing of the past if Obama and the Democratic Socialist Party gets their way and they create and install a government run healthcare system. Of course, they are going to deny that and tell you that folks like me, who actually tell you the truth about such things, are “full of it” and don’t know what we are talking about. The sad thing about all of this is that by the time you find out that those of us warning against a government system are, in fact, telling you the truth, it will be too late and healthcare in the US will be scraping the bottom of the barrel like so many other socialized medicine programs around the globe. In other words it will be too cussed late to do anything about it!

One other thing: Do not feel secure, if, like me, you have your own private health Insurance, Why? Because the government run plan will run the private plans out of business. The private plans will not be government subsidized. The government plan(s) will. How can the private plans even be expected to compete against the government plans when the deck is so stacked against them? The simple answer is… they can’t. Soon you and I, with our private health care plans, will eventually wind up on the government health dole — whether we want to or not — and that’s the ultimate plan!

In an article titled: “Obama’s ‘Public’ Health Plan Will Bankrupt the Nation” Lawrence Kudlow says: “And does anybody believe Obama’s new “public” health-insurance plan isn’t really a bridge to single-payer government-run health care? And does anyone think this plan won’t produce a government gatekeeper that will allocate health services and control prices and therefore crowd-out the private-insurance doctor-hospital system?

Federal boards are going to decide what’s good for you and me. And what’s not good for you and me. These boards will drive a wedge between doctors and patients.” Kudlow goes on to say:”…. the Obama Democrats are determined to force through a state-run system that will bankrupt the country.” Read the entire article HERE.

Currently, there are four plans under consideration. One would simply expand Medicare. It would be a fully government run program and would not have to remain solvent to remain in business. The second would be set-up by the government and be required to remain solvent while establishing their own networks and payment schemes. Then there is the plan to have each state create it’s own state insurance following government guidelines. And the one with the least chance of making it out of committee is to have no government plan at all — and instead — clean up the current private insurance programs and police them better than they have in the past.

If all this sounds like a mess, believe me when I tell you that it IS a mess!

Look, you get nothing for free. Everything has a price, a cost. The cost may be hidden, but, believe me, it is there. The price of socialized medicine in America will be so unbelievably high if will be impossible to hide. The government will have to choose between continuing to raise taxes to pay for it, or reduce the amount of healthcare available to the patients.

There is always the threat of a tax revolt in America if the government continues to raise taxes. Many believe the tax revolt has already begun with the American Tea Parties. The first round if those tea parties saw an estimated one million Americans meeting, all across America, to protest taxes already levied by the government on her citizens. Another wave of Tea Parties are expected on July Fourth, the birthday of the nation, and many in the Republican Party now suspect the American Tea Parties are simply the birth of a third political party in America.

The GOP is between a rock and a hard place here. If they do not put up an extremely good fight against Socialized Medicine in America, there is good reason to believe there will be a mass migration of conservatives from the GOP and into other conservative political parties. The American Tea Party will be perfectly positioned to welcome those migrants into their conservative party.

The Democrat Socialist Party would be well advised to tread lightly on socialized medicine. It could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for them.

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J. D. Longstreet blogs daily at INSIGHT on Freedom … … http://csadispatch.blogspot.com/

This webpage is copied in full from fee.org.  It is a fine expression which applies to the economic collapse of today.

http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=2396&year=2008&month=10

October 10, 2008

by Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and “In brief,” and a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. TGIF appears Fridays. Comments welcome.

What might be even more distressing than the current buildup of the corporate state in response to the supposed economic crisis is the way some self-styled advocates of the free market are willing to cast aside the economic theory they claimed to embrace.

(Aside: I say supposed crisis because the “credit freeze” that was said to require such massive government intervention seems to be a Big Lie. All indicators, from Federal Reserve statistics to anecdotal evidence based on my phone calls to local bankers and auto dealers, confirm that ample money is available to people with good credit and/or collateral. I still see Ditech TV commercials and get credit-card come-ons in the mail nearly every day. See Robert Higgs’s “The Data Don’t Justify the Financial-Market Panic.”)

Back to theory. If you are a glutton for cable news-talk shows, you know it’s been little more than a parade of “experts” declaring the absolute imperative of government bailouts. Many of these experts preface their remarks by saying how much they hate the idea of government intervention to save business from its mistakes. “I’m a free-market, small-government advocate, but….” Jack Welch, formerly head of government-contractor GE, and columnist Lawrence Kudlow are among many who have said things like that. Since they spoke on television programs, I can’t quote them verbatim, but the tenor of their remarks is that the free market is great when things are going well, but this is an emergency and we don’t have the luxury of theory. Statements like this were most common during the frantic week between the House’s rejection of and reversal on the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Where to begin? Right off the bat we can see a problem. Any bailout plan that is believed to be potentially effective must be based on a theory. Otherwise it would merely be a shot in the dark. If you asked a TARP advocate why the intervention is necessary, he presumably would explain the problem and how the bailout would remedy it. For example, he might say that when the government borrows $700 billion in order to buy banks’ bad mortgage-backed securities, it will inject liquidity into the credit markets and improve the economy. But that is a theory. (It’s a bad theory, but it is a theory.) So the apparently bold thrusting aside of all theory in the name of pragmatic action is a mere pose. The move is as theory-bound as free-market opposition to the bailout is.

Contest of Theories

The debate, then, is a contest of theories. Free-market theory can explain the cause of the crisis –  government intervention in the mortgage market through promotion of easy home-buying and implicit guarantees to lenders and underwriters, including its privileged creatures, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Given that genesis of the problems and the general theory of markets, the solution is for government to back off — way off — and to let the economy adjust to real conditions and recover without subsidy, guarantee, or regulation. What is the alternative theory used by those who have jettisoned free-market theory in “this time of crisis”? Why should we believe that things will be fine only if the government has the discretionary power to transfer resources from those who haven’t screwed up to those who have?

There’s a unattractive anti-intellectualism in the scoffing at theory. The fact is, we can’t live without it. As I’ve noted before, William Graham Sumner long ago dismissed the claim that something can be true in theory but not in practice:

That a thing can be true in theory and false in practice is the most utter absurdity that human language can express. For, if a thing is true in practice (protectionism, for instance) the theory of its truth can be found, and that theory will be true. But it was admitted that free trade is true in theory. Hence two things which are contradictory would both be true at the same time about the same thing. [Protectionism: The -Ism which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth (1885), chapter 4, section m.]

Mises and Theory

Ludwig von Mises had a thing or two to say about theory. For Mises the theories of economics (more broadly, human action) are derived by spinning out the logical corollaries of the inescapable concept action, of which we have apodictic “a priori” knowledge. (These corollaries include among others: purpose, means and ends, value and preference, cost, time preference, and profit and loss.) We do not acquire economic theories through observation. Indeed, as Roderick Long suggests, we can’t imagine observing human behavior outside a means-end framework: “[O]ur conceptual understanding plays a constitutive role in our perceptual experience.” This is the a priori nature of Mises’s “praxeology,” or logic of action. As he wrote in “Social Science and Natural Science”:

Economics therefore is not based on or derived (abstracted) from experience. It is a deductive system, starting from the insight into the principles of human reason and conduct. As a matter of fact all our experience in the field of human action is based on and conditioned by the circumstance that we have this insight in our mind. Without this a priori knowledge and the theorems derived from it we could not at all realize what is going on in human activity. Our experience of human action and social life is predicated on praxeological and economic theory.

Or as he wrote in Human Action: “History speaks only to those people who know how to interpret it on the ground of correct theories.”

If our premises are true and our reasoning is logically sound, our conclusions are true. This doesn’t mean that economics is done without reference to the world. It means only that we look at the economic world, as it were, with praxeological lenses — and are powerless to do otherwise. To be sure, we must first confirm that we are observing human action in an economic context (and not, say, a game, ritual, or reflexive motion), but once we do that, our a priori understanding of economics applies.

There is never a good time to throw aside theory and just act, for such a thing is impossible. The only question is whether our theory is good or bad.