Hidden Cost to Socialized Medicine - Personal Privacy

An e-mail, "Crazy - But Maybe Not" hit my in-box. The text following the link to an ACLU scare video warned, "This is funny, but the scary part about it is that it's probably not too far away from being reality."

A "simulation" follows of how troubling ordering your favorite pizza may become. We see a mock "Pizza Palace" call-center computer screen with the text, "Detecting phone number... Detecting National ID...Loading record.."

We learn (along with the hungry caller) that Pizza Palace has his health records, detail of subscriptions and family information because they "just hooked into the system". The caller wants a double-meat pie and is informed that, based on his history of high cholesterol and blood pressure, he'll have to ante-up for the $20 surcharge and sign a waiver for associated health risks at time of delivery. That can be waived if he orders the bean-sprout covered pizza facsimile.

If we rely on the Nanny State to take care of us, you can count on that same Nanny collecting lots of personal information and imposing certain non-negotiable requirements on "the children"- which is all of us according to framers of the Nanny State. Want evidence? Check out John Edwards' ideas about government mandated doctor visits. Edwards has such silky locks, how could he be Big Brother?

The ACLU wanted me scared - but the scenario sounds right to me. There will be costs to "free" health care, count on it. When it's time to vote, I'll be casting mine for personal privacy, personal accountability, and keeping the government out of "managing" my health, thanks.

If we're so thick as a nation that we should ever adopt taxpayer-funded "Universal Health Care", you can expect this kind of trampling of personal privacy, after all, how can the govermment manage health without any personal information?

If "everybody" is going to be granted carte blanche with our tax dollars, we'll need to know when, how long, and at what intensity-level they're on the treadmill, as well as what food they're eating, how much and how late at night. And they'll need health metrics for each of us, like regular cholesterol, blood pressure, body-mass index, and urinalysis.

If there's to be any hope of making this pot-and-pizza-fueled massive federal social program work, they'll have to implement accountability measures to keep the whole system from going bankrupt. If you want in on the health gravy-train (an oxymoron?), you're going to have to show that you're taking care of yourself. Only fair isn't it? There are only so many tax dollars in the budget and it wouldn't be fair to let Twinkie King's quadruple bypass eat up the town Eagle Scout's annual check-up allowance, would it? Read the article at the link above for an eye-opener about obesity causing health-care cost hikes even larger than those caused by smoking or problem drinking.

The bright-side is, we don't have to turn over our health decisions to a bloated, federal bureaucracy. We don't need to super-size medicine, we need Healthcare Unplugged. Just each of us and our doctor. Doc takes care of us and is paid by us which means he works for us; not an HMO geared to profit stockholders. Isn't the job of doctors keeping us, not an investment portfolio, healthy? The bonus? Our private, personal information remains just that.

Look around. As a general rule, bigger is not better. Not big government, not big business. The bigger administrative bodies get, the less personal and responsive they become. Do we really want to take one of the most personal things in our lives - our own health - and make a gigantic federal bureaucracy responsible for it? When we need responsiveness, do we want to turn to the feds or to small, efficient, local organizations? When were you last "very satisfied" with the service you received from a federal agency? A state agency? See my point?

If you've read this far and still get all misty thinking nationalized health care is "the answer"consider the opinion of Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in Economic Science, "We have a socialist-communist system of distributing medical care. Instead of letting people hire their own physicians and pay them, no one pays his or her own medical bills. Instead, there's a third party payment system. It is a communist system and it has a communist result...we've seen costs skyrocket. Nobody is happy: physicians don't like it, patients don't like it. Why? Because none of them are responsible for themselves. You no longer have a situation in which a patient chooses a physician, receives a service, gets charged, and pays for it. There is no direct relation between the patient and the physician. The physician is an employee of an insurance company or an employee of the government. Today, a third party pays the bills. As a result, no one who visits the doctor asks what the charge is going to be—somebody else is going to take care of that. The end result is third party payment and, worst of all, third party treatment.

Mr. Friedman's book Free To Choose is a must-read in understanding the economic choices we must make to preserve Freedom for ourselves and future generations.