Monday, November 28, 2005

Universal health care

Catholic News Service has a story on the sixtieth anniversary of the first call for universal health care by President Truman.

Sister Bernice Coreil, who has been working in health care for more than 50 years, said the key problem is the lack of a national will to achieve comprehensive health care coverage for all Americans.

"We said we would get people to the moon by a certain time, and we did it, but we do not have a health care policy that says by the year 2015, every American will have access to health care," said Sister Bernice, also a Daughter of Charity.

The problem, Sister, is that we went to the Moon a few times and then the Apollo program got axed in budget cuts. Once universal health care is instituted and Americans can get relatively cheap medical services, costs are going to spiral out of control and are our politicians going to be willing to cut it?

Look at the current situation with penicilin. The drug is losing its punch because Americans get sick, go to the doctor and ask for a shot. Do we really think that with cheap health care, Americans will exercise any more common sense? Even will high costs under the current system, people sneeze and go to the doctor. Anyone living in a utopian mindset that universal health care will be efficient and effective needs to stop 'thinking of the children' and start thinking of how much of his or her income he or she wants to pay to the government on a regular basis for waiting hours for a doctor's appointment and other simple services to say nothing for CAT scans, MRIs and everything else.

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