Are We Really Ready for Socialized Medicine?

Folks may be getting more than they asked for. People paying attention to 30 second sound bites on this subject will allow it to come to fruition. It seems that people can no longer read or at least can not read anything longer than the McDonald or Starbucks menu and be expected to comprehend it. Of course understanding the ingredients in their favorite latte is easier and vastly more enjoyable than understanding what socialized medicine will be like. Some of us older folks can understand a bit about it, at least those who have experienced the Medicare wonderment and general FUBAR(Fouled Up Beyond All Repair for those who were never in the military) made by the Feds out of this ill conceived and rapidly thought up program. The same results will be found in the new socialized medicine that is about to be foisted upon us. It has been talked about and argued for years but without any actual thought of how the thing is suppose to work or how it will be paid for over then next 10 years much less over then next generations to come. I hear the argument for single payer systems from many who actually don’t have a clue or have failed to look at the current singer payer system that is rapidly falling apart.
I see young doctors regularly who run at the thought of going into family practice. I have friends who are doctors and in family practice and are now on the verge of losing all that they have worked for. They can not pay the bills because the program does not work in other words the government doesn’t pay the bills on time if ever. They continue to treat patients while their kids wear hand me downs and their car continually needs repairs. That’s called dedication but dedication will not go very far in feeding and housing their kids. So take time to read this. Yes , it’s a bit long but reading something as important as this will go much further than the 30 second sound bites that you will soon be receiving by way of the boob tube. It pays to be informed!
Just a note concerning an item that is thrown into the so called Stimulus Bill that would give government MORE control over health care and treatment than any other plan other than Hillary’s failed 1990’s plan. The stimulus legislation would create a council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. This is about medicine but not about healing the economy. The CER would identify (this is language from the draft report on the legislation) medical "items, procedures, and interventions" that it deems insufficiently effective or excessively expensive. They "will no longer be prescribed" by federal health programs.
The next secretary of health and human services, Tom Daschle, has advocated a "Federal Health Board" similar to the CER, whose recommendations "would have teeth": Congress could restrict the tax exclusion for private health insurance to "insurance that complies with the Board's recommendation." The CER, which would dramatically advance government control — and rationing — of health care, should be thoroughly debated, not stealthily created in the name of "stimulus."
Talk about raw socialism ! But then coming from someone like Daschle what do you expect.

A Health Care Model For Failure
Taken from INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Socialized Medicine: Anyone who thinks a national single-payer system would be an improvement isn't paying attention. Medicare, which provides coverage for less than 15% of the population, can't get it right.
The federal government seems to always be in a hurry to dole out pork, but it has problems reimbursing doctors who see Medicare patients.
Payments have been so late in some cases that doctors from New York to California have had little choice but to take out loans — some as large as $3 million — to bridge the gap.
The late payments, which can be over $100,000, are only part of the problem for doctors.
In too many instances, the compensation that is eventually provided by Medicare — an amount determined by bureaucrats, not the market, and is therefore subject to error — is simply not enough to cover the physicians' costs.
"When I saw a Medicare patient with pneumonia and they needed a shot that cost $30, and Medicare would reimburse only $21, I gave him the shot," Eugene Wood, a recently retired Jackson physician, told the Mississippi Business Journal last fall.
"I went ahead and practiced good medicine. But I just kept going in the hole."
The trend toward late and below-cost reimbursements creates trouble at two levels.
First, some doctors are cutting back on the number of Medicare patients they see — limiting medical care access for the elderly who rely on Medicare and have paid into it for 40 years or more.
Still others found that they have had to lay off staff and trim their own salaries to continue their practices.
Second, the arrangement kills incentives for medical school students to practice family medicine, which already seems to be a dying art, as only 8% of 2006 U.S. medical school graduates opted for family practices. That's about half the number of graduates who were choosing to go into family practice in the early 1990s.
Making $150,000 a year right out of school might sound like a dream to many, but when doctors owe a year's salary and often more in medical school student loans, their handsome incomes don't look as attractive. A family physician has to be as good a businessman as a doctor if he is to keep his practice above water.
If this is the mess that Medicare is producing, imagine the intractable complications that a universal government system would bring.
Who would want to practice medicine under those conditions? Where will sick Americans go when doctors are fleeing practices and the demand for care under a "free" system outstrips supply?
Medicare and Medicaid, the program for low-income Americans, cover a quarter of the U.S. population and will account for a fourth of federal outlays this year.
No matter how much a Washington player promises that he or she can bring health care costs down through a national system, the numbers say that under a universal program, the entire federal budget will be dedicated to providing health care.
Like it or not — and we don't — Medicare and Medicaid, both established in 1965, have become deeply embedded in the American fabric. They will not go away. The best we can hope for is some sort of reform that lessens the taxpayers' liabilities and increases the responsibility of individuals.
What the country doesn't need is universal care. If universal care is the only alternative, we'd prefer the status quo.
But even that's trouble. Already Medicare's Hospital Insurance is paying out more in benefits than it takes in from tax revenues. By next year, outlays for the entire program will exceed income. The Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be exhausted by 2019.
System trustees estimate that over the long term, Medicare will have $36 trillion in obligations that aren't funded under the current setup. That, according to analysts at the Heritage Foundation, means "every American household's share of Medicare's unfunded obligation is like a $320,000 IOU."
If Washington can't run a program for 44.1 million people without bankrupting the nation, how can it possibly operate a national health care system for more than 300 million? Think about it!