Sunday, April 20, 2008

Healthcare Versus Freedom

I watched a silly little piece about universal healthcare last night on P.B.S. This seemingly rational older dude traipsed around the world to find out how many other countries handle providing universal healthcare to all their citizens. Now, obviously this guy doesn't like the U.S. version, so he relied mostly on statistics in order to say a particular country was doing better than the U.S. or not. I've noticed massive discrepancies in statistics before. Different countries add things up differently, plus the international health organizations actually give you more points socialized health care, so America ends up looking worse in the stats just because we are a bit less socialized.

Anyway, this dude went to all these different countries and in every country they force people to do something, and there is always some part of the healthcare infrastructure having trouble. And this guy just ignores the implications of forcing everyone to do something. He, and almost everyone who thinks we actually need some sort of healthcare system thinks it's okay to force someone to pay, and force them to use whatever form of universal healthcare they come up with. And he thinks this despite the fact that most of the actual entities providing the healthcare in all these countries were suffering in some way.

It is wrong to force people to either pay or partake in a system against their will. If the policy idea starts in such error, there will forever be problems, as there always have been with these ridiculous plans.
And no, I'm not going to spend much time here proving the universal healtcare approach is crap. It is crap, and it is rather easy to find out just how bad it is, if you care. My point here is that I was quite upset that someone could so blythely suggest, oh yes, let's just force 300 million people to do what we want them to do in this area. You know, there were healthcare contracts for slaves- had to keep your investments healthy, after all.

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