Rethinking health care

By Chief Contributor Frederic J. Rohner

I was all ready to post the following idea regarding health care this morning when, to my utter shock and surprise, I read this piece from the Huffington Post (via RealClearPolitics) in which contributor Bill Maher basically echoes the exact sentiment I will present to you.

Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait. Done? Good.

Why is it that health care is a for profit industry? How is a doctor any different than a police officer or a firefighter? All tend to us in times of emergency, albeit in varying degrees. All describe their occupations as “callings” more than just a way to make a buck. All serve the public good, and as such, none should be for profit businesses.

With all the debate raging and centered around health care and the prospect of “socialized medicine,” the thought occurred to me that we really must rethink health care and the way the entire industry is constructed. Critics of “socialized medicine” and the “single payer option” have pointed to the fear of government bureaucrats getting between them and their doctors, but isn’t that what is already happening? Why is a corporate bureaucrat any different or more desirable than one from the government? If doctors come to be thought of in the same vein as police officers, firefighters, and even soldiers– that is, government employees who serve the public–then why would we need paper pushers to decide who gets what coverage, who gets denied, or who has to die waiting for treatment? Think of it this way: does a police officer demand payment from you for arresting the person who mugged you? Do you have to fill out pages of paperwork before your house fire is extinguished?

No. So then why do we currently do these things for the people who revive, cure and heal us from knife wounds, broken bones, and third degree burns?

You want to cut costs for health care? Then stop making money off of it. You want to expand health coverage? Then make it truly accessible for all, make it non-profit. Don’t take over the insurance companies, take over the hospitals.

The only entity or person hurt by this would be the insurance companies and the people who make money from human suffering.

And don’t give me that bullshit about stifling innovation. You mean to tell me that no innovations have been made in catching criminals? You really want to argue that firefighters are worse at putting out fires than they were twenty years ago?

A health insurance company is merely a parasitic middleman. It’s time to cut out the middleman. It’s time to rethink health care altogether.

James Taranto is shockingly, sickeningly self-righteous

James Taranto offers his take on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates at WSJ today. If you don’t feel like reading the article, here’s his position in a nutshell:

“Henry Louis Gates wasn’t a victim of racism because I was in a similar situation and I’m white. What’s the big deal? Get over it already.”

That’s basically it. Except there’s a few problems with the story related by Mr. Taranto. A) He wasn’t arrested. He was allowed to explain his predicament to the officers who arrived at the scene and that was the end of it. B) He wasn’t at his own fucking house. Taranto was staying at a friend’s home in Alexandria, he had a key, he had permission to be there, but a neighbor reported seeing a stranger in the backyard and called the police. Taranto was a stranger. The neighbor more or less did the right thing.

In Henry Louis Gates’ situation, he was not a stranger. He was entering his own home. He was in his own neighborhood. Let’s get one thing straight though, the police who were called to Gates’ house are not to be blamed for doing their jobs. Maybe they could have handled the situation better, maybe not, but the fact of the matter is that they were called to the home because of racism. And Henry Louis Gates was arrested as a result.

The neighbor who called the cops to Mr. Gates’ home is a racist who saw two black men trying to open a jammed door and assumed that they didn’t belong there, assumed that they were burglars, assumed they were strangers when in fact, one was her neighbor. The neighbor who called the cops on Mr. Taranto saw someone in their neighbor’s house who hadn’t been there before, a stranger, not a  neighbor.

The two situations could not be more different, but Mr. Taranto wants you to read them as the same so that he can argue that racism is dead.

The Military Industrial Complex actually loses for once

Fred Kaplan over at Slate has a great breakdown of the recent vote to scrap new production of more F-22’s, and what makes it so remarkable and amazing. It’s not often that the Military Industrial Complex loses out on what it wants, and it is also a rare occurrence to have politicians speak on the floor and transparently argue for their own self interest, but to read excerpts of speeches from the floor, that is exactly what happened yesterday.

From Kaplan’s piece:

“…it was a vote that reflected corporate contracts. The floor leaders of the faction in favor of more F-22s were Sens. Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from Georgia, where the F-22 is assembled, and Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, where parts of the plane are built. Joining this strange couple were such erstwhile doves as Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, which also hosts several F-22 contractors.”

But what’s the bottom line? Why don’t we need to make F-22’s anymore?

The F-22 is a hold over from the Cold War, when there was a much higher probability of being drawn into a war that would require the kind of air combat that F-22’s were designed for. Seeing as how the two wars we are fighting now have been almost entirely fought on the ground, the F-22 has become a very expensive piece of badass equipment that sits in a hangar and gets dusted off for air shows. Not to mention the fact that no U.S. soldier has been killed by enemy aircraft since 1951.

Oh yeah, and we’ll also be maintaining nearly 200 F-22’s just in case Russia wants to start something. And, production of the new hotness, the F-35, starts in 2010.

We’rrrrrrrrreeeeee Baaaaacccckkkkkkkk!

Rebel is now officially back! We took some time off to get away from the Blogosphere for a little while (kinda got sick of the hypocritical gushing over Obama as well as the hypocritical Obama bashing).

Break time is over, the time card has been punched, we are back.

Pundits and politicians, consider yourselves warned.

 

–Rebel Editorial Staff