Bitter pills, false cures

Congress returns to work seeking to go where Hillary Clinton as first lady has gone before, to discuss universal health care. For one thing in this there is reason to be thankful: A growing number of Democrats have concluded there is little hope among them or Republicans for enacting climate change initiatives. For another thing, there is reason to worry: on health care, lawmakers in both parties might be ready to move.

Less prepared to budge are facts both hard and heavy. Health care costs big money. A notion prevails on the left that because of this government should intervene and foot bills. This ignores the obvious. Government doesn’t foot bills. Taxpayers do, and the costs of government-funded health care, combined with Social Security, already poses a problem that will, in the fashion of an aggressive cancer, only grow larger and nastier, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

If the current structure remains in place, by 2082 the combined costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would drive the tax rate for the lowest bracket “from 10 percent to 25 percent; the tax rate on incomes in the current 25 percent bracket would have to be increased to 63 percent; and the tax rate of the highest bracket would have to be raised from 35 percent to 88 percent,” according to the CBO. The latter spike also would be reflected in the corporate income tax rate. All of this, the CBO says, “would significantly reduce economic activity,” translating to a shortfall in the revenues needed to pay for these programs and others.

This would necessitate government making difficult choices, about which doctors people see, which hospitals they use and which treatments they receive. The lurching federal bureaucracy – composed of thousands of bureaucrats, tens of thousands of regulations and a diabolically complex tax code – would, somehow, swell exponentially. Those who have carefully contemplated the problem principally by viewing Michael Moore’s “Sicko” and concluded that government-run health care is what America needs should try the idea where it’s employed.

Lindsay McCreith has, and has discovered he’s better off in Buffalo. That’s where the retired auto body shop owner landed after learning he’d have to wait four months in his native Canada to get an MRI for his malignant brain tumor, and then he’d have to wait again to see a neurologist. Instead, he went south, to New York, for a surgery that saved his life. “I wouldn’t like to see Americans make the same mistake Canadians have made,” he told The Toronto Star last year. “Patients in Canada are treated like Third World citizens.”

Having permitted vestiges of nationalized health care to creep into the American system through Medicare and Medicaid, and ignoring the rumbling inside the Social Security volcano, the United States could be careening in the direction of the Third World already. Dependence on foreign oil is nothing compared to dependence on the federal government because every cent upon which that entity feeds must be pulled from Americans’ pockets with the payers having been stripped of their ability to say no.

This doesn’t yet apply to Republicans, whom Democrats are fond of labeling as being from the Party of No. That’s the right answer to nationalized health care, and it’s the one we should expect from the party on the right. Democrats dating back to FDR have schemed for a government takeover of the health care system, but only now do they sense they’re on the verge of making it happen.

Both sides can agree that reforms are needed. An excellent point at which to begin would be in litigation, which lawyers such as John Edwards have used to rake in millions of dollars from frivolous lawsuits that have made over birth care to cause a needless spike in Caesarean-sections and a huge increase in medical malpractice premiums. Tort reform is one step among many that could lower costs.

The suggestion that nationalized health care is another or better step is pure subterfuge. Breaking a system that isn’t broken by putting government in charge of health care – in addition to its newly acquired duties overseeing the banking and auto industries – ultimately would break America, both her economy and spirit.