harry and louise would hate

Harry and Louise Would Hate the Massachusetts Health Plan

The legislature of the most liberal state in the country,

Massachusetts, has just passed a bill that would require everyone to

buy health insurance and would subsidize insurance for those who can't

afford it with government handouts. The Republican Governor Mitt

Romney, who is running for President, has said he will sign the bill.

But while it is being hailed even by some conservatives, this plan

appears to be nothing more than Socialized Medicine.

I don't really know the details of the plan, but I do know that the

"Harry and Louise" ads, which helped torpedo the Clinton health plan,

showed us that socialized medicine is very frightening. The

advertisements, which were sponsored by the nonpartisan Health

Insurance Association of America, featured a middle-class couple

sitting at a kitchen table looking extremely worried about the

prospect of affordable health care. They were terrified at being

forced to choose among "plans designed by government bureaucrats"

instead of by insurance companies. After seeing these ads most

Americans concluded that it would be better for some people not to

have any insurance at all.

The United States has the best health care in the world. You can

easily prove that by doing a Google search on the phrase "The United

States has the best health care in the world," which gives you 278

pages, while a search on, say, "Canada has the best health care in the

world" gives you only 12 results. (Although the World Health

Organization claims France has the best health care in the world and

the U.S. ranks 37th, WHO's "data" is unreliable since the organization

is part of the United Nations, which hates America.) The reason the

United States has the best health care system in the world is

precisely because it's so exclusive. If everyone could go to Harvard,

it wouldn't be a very good school anymore. And no one wants to belong

to a club that lets everyone in. The only way to continue to have "the

best health care in the world" is for the United States to continue to

be selective about who actually gets it.

The Cato Institute has warned that the Massachusetts plan would start

us on the "slippery slope" toward National Health Insurance. Slippery

slopes are perhaps the worst slopes you can imagine. For example, gay

marriage (which Massachusetts is also pioneering) would lead us on the

slippery slope to people marrying their pets and livestock. Another

example of a dangerous slippery slope is marijuana use, which

invariably leads to heroin addiction, which we know because studies

have shown that most junkies started out by smoking marijuana. The

Massachusetts Plan, in a sense, would be a gateway drug that would

result in people craving more and more health care. And who would

ultimately be the beneficiaries of more health care? Trial lawyers, of

course, because more health care will naturally result in more

malpractice suits.

The engine that runs our economy is incentive. Socialized medicine

takes away incentive. Giving health care away for virtually nothing

will mean that the poor will no longer have the incentive to strive to

be wealthy enough to afford health care, which means they will stop

working and the economy will collapse. Sitting around bored with

nothing to do many of these people may turn to marijuana. And we all

know where that leads.

Jon Swift, Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, Health Insurance, Health,

Health Care, Medicine, Harry and Louise, World Health Organization,

Canada, France, Politics, Economics, Pirates! Open Trackback Day

Posted by Jon Swift at 4/06/2006 09:07:00 PM