-- At 09:07 PM 10/22/2000 -0700, Nathan Saper wrote:
OK, granted, the government needs to be kept on a tight leash. Most people will not want the government breaking into their homes. However, I think most people would be willing to vote for a bill that would guarantee insurance for people with genetic abnormalities, even that does mean that some CEOs and stockholders will have less money in their already-full pockets.
You cannot provide cheap insurance by punishing insurers, any more than you can provide cheap housing by punishing landlords. It has been tried. A law compelling insurance companies to insure the unhealthy will merely raise costs for the healthy, resulting in more people going uninsured. If you want to guarantee insurance for the unhealthy without ill effects the TAXPAYER has to pay, and I suspect that if this proposition was put to the public, enthusiasm would be considerably less. Indeed the Clintons did put something very like that proposition to the public, and there was little enthusiasm.
We cannot provide all the medical care for everyone who might want it. The question then is who decides who lives and who dies?
We could easily provide healthcare for every American citizen. Just raise taxes a bit, and cut out most of our military spending.
We can provide RATIONED health care for every american citizen. And then who gets to do the rationing? Rationing is popular in Canada, because the wealthy skip across the border to the US. It would be considerably less popular in the US, because we have no unrationed health care conveniently nearby. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG e9ZUIWoa0uYBCwK2J5X9FrqbTnMcyu9rsO7nNHN/ 44gAW0FvWKBINlJj8Vy3dLcxDWiT2R/BtBDOUSQuZ