Care Vs. Delivery

Brother Harry Reid, the prominent Senator from Nevada ought to take care about the delivery of his words. However, according to his logic, Barack Obama and myself have much in common: we are both "light skinned, with no Negro dialect" unless of course, we want one.

Perhaps it was Brother Reid's Mormon upbringing that instilled in him such misconstrued racial insensitivity? Perhaps. But that theory does little to explain the racism of Bill Clinton.

Moving on.

What I really intended to post about was health care. For the sake of argument, I will concede that the so-called health care reform that Harry Pelosi is constructing will actually reduce costs and increase coverage. It won't do either of those things, but again, for the purpose of this post, I will assume that what Barack O'Barney is telling me is true.

Fine. Everyone is covered, and it costs nothing. Fantastic.

But what does that do to increase the quality of care?

The United States has the best health care in the world. Our R&D is unsurpassed. Our drugs the most effective, our physicians and medical schools top of the line. The US has the best cancer survival rates in the world. 18 of the last 30 winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine have been US Citizens (For what that is worth).

But the politickers on Capital Hill never mention the already unsurpassed quality of American health care. We only hear that it's broken, and discriminatory, and inferior to European models.

The truth is that the American system of delivery is broken. The third-party payer system, the government intervention and the large bureaucratic mess created by both insurance companies and Uncle Sam have indeed "broken" the health insurance model.

The fix for that however is not more bureaucracy. Only the upside down logic of a lobbyist or politician would prescribe the cause of a problem as the solution. And yet, that is precisely what we are being presented with as tonic for this illness.

Will government control and delivery of health insurance cause:

• chemotherapy to improve?
• the occurrences of heart disease to drop?
• the quality of medical education to increase?
• an increase in healthy lifestyles?
• a decrease in obesity?

No. Of course not. The reverse is probably true (see; Poverty, War on). That is, all those things and more will most likely suffer when the government controls health care delivery, and makes actual care decisions. Instead of a market that creates incentive for R&D and fierce competition within medical schools, the government will create a blase environment of mediocrity, in both the professional and educational worlds. Why be excellent, when a government funded job is inevitable? Why live a healthy lifestyle when there is no financial incentive (never mind the actual, physical benefits) for doing so? Why worry? Uncle Sam has got it covered!

The delivery of health care is hampered and hindered by government mandates, large bureaucratic leviathans, and an ignorant consumer base that has no idea what certain procedures actually cost, and what they ought to cost.

But the care itself, is the best in the world.

So, before you clamor and crow for "health care reform" it might be wise to consider what effect such legislation will have on that care.