"Universal" health care considerations and a dirty little secret on how this thing called government now handles it in the USofA

Should the Veterans Administration Take Over All Health Care?
By Richard E. Ralston
March 19, 2007

For years the advocates of a total takeover of health care by the
government have pointed to the Veterans Administration as the model of
efficient and caring health care by our government. It provides an
ideal model, they said, for all health care. They must have forgotten
to tell us to pay no attention to the leaks, the pealing paint and the
rats in the corner while they push to eliminate personal choice for
everyone and trap us all in a system with no options and nowhere else
to go.

For whom should we expect the government to provide the best health
care treatment-and living conditions while that care is delivered-if
not for those who have fulfilled their duty to that government: our
wounded combat veterans? They expect (and should demand) the best
treatment possible. Yet, wounded veterans are constrained to a system
with few or no choice of options. What, then, should the rest of us
expect from the loving arms and warm embrace of government-managed
health care? What would happen if we were all involuntarily absorbed
into the bosom of government health care? Would we expect tender and
solicitous care-or a distant, insensitive, wasteful and indifferent
bureaucracy?

Both the U.S. Army and the Veterans Administration clearly have large
numbers of competent medical professionals delivering care. But
soldiers in rehabilitation often have to wait a long time, travel a
long way or live in terrible conditions to receive care. One of the
amazing things about the problems at Walter Reed was that only the
government could have developed the idea of a live-in, out-patient
clinic.

In the face of this calamity and such inspirations as the tired
response of all levels of government to Hurricane Katrina, the
tireless advocates of medical socialism will continue to maintain that
only the government can care for us adequately.

In the face of New York's cartel of hospital administrators and health
care public employee unions driving the annual cost of New York
Medicaid past $47 billion and clamoring for more, the friends of ever-
growing government will tell us that they will always manage spending
better than private providers.

When we encounter those from this fantasy world of supposedly caring
and efficient government, we must always respond with the facts. When
someone says that the problem with health care is the cost and only
the government can restrain expense, we must always ask them exactly
when the government developed an ability to restrain expense. During
the forty years of exploding Medicare and Medicaid spending? Or while
the gross waste and fraud in New York Medicaid was going into orbit?

When we are told that health care by for-profit companies should be
outlawed because such profits increase our health care costs, we must
respond that it is the need to make a profit that results in what cost
control we have. A government drawing on unlimited taxes and debt
cannot control costs or even fraud. And what kind of "profit" will the
leaders of public employee unions-and the politicians they fund-gain
if they seize a total monopoly over health care and eliminate all of
our other options?

When we are told that we would not have to worry about paying for our
health care-whatever it costs-because the government will pick up the
tab, we need to point out that once everything is "free" it will get
really expensive. And we will watch the government decide that it owns
what it is paying for-and that it therefore owns our bodies and can
instruct us what to do with them.

But it will still be a free country, right?

Before engaging in such debates, we must first tell the government to
get health care in order and under control for those who have been
wounded in government service. In light of their ongoing failure to
get that right, however, we should not tolerate even the request to
give government more power.