Archive: Socialized medicine on the sly

February 4, 2004

Let's begin with this excerpt:

Remarks at Press Conference by OR Governor Ted Kulongoski Wednesday, February 4, 2004:

Yesterday, the people of Oregon were forced to pick between two difficult choices: pay more in taxes at a time when many families are having trouble making ends meet, or face cuts in essential services like education, health care, and law enforcement. Given the state of the economy, the fact that a majority of voters decided not to take on a higher tax burden isn't surprising. But now it's time to move forward. The voters have spoken, and it's our job in Salem to follow their direction and reduce spending.

Pretty depressing.

Can people really imagine that it doesn't cost us each more in the long run--and the short run, if our ways of doing the math only reflected it-- to do without the services that are now going to be cut?

To pick one example: Federal law still mandates, fortunately, that no one who comes to an emergency room needing care can be turned away. And I certainly wouldn't want them to be. But when 40% of the American people--a figure heavily tilted toward children--don't have health insurance to pay for it, where does that cost magically go? Eventually, it winds up coming from the people who can afford insurance. And these indirect costs are made even worse, because for most of those folks, the ER is their primary care provider, which means all the preventative care that keeps costs down--and keeps them healthier--never gets done, so trips to medical care cost more anyway.

I wouldn't prefer that my insurance premiums went down by some fraction and left those people unprotected, but why can't we call a spade a spade and admit this is indeed "socialized health care," the very thing that all the right-wing anti-government tax-haters claim to despise most? And not only that, since it's distributing these health care resources in the most bass-ackwards way imaginable, it's really, really, inefficient socialized health care--and those anti-government tax-hater types hate inefficiency almost more than socialism!

So what's the deal here? We all tacitly agree to socialize the costs, as long as we don't admit that's what we're doing because socialism is bad.

You really have to wonder just what the average person on the street who votes for this starve-the-system tax cutting imagines is going to happen. Do they think it'll be easier for them to get rich if the state is poor?