(Not my own words)
PART THE FIRST: CHEAP RHINOPLASTY IS THE RESULT OF A COLLAPSING MEDICAL SYSTEM
The most important doctor in society, the most important doctor you will ever have, is the family doctor. The GP who knows your weight, your blood pressure, complains when you smoke, all of that. As has been noted, they make a decent salary but nothing special. They're in line with what European doctors make.
Until you factor in malpractice insurance, which has been increasing its rates about 20% a year for the past decade or more, while doctor salaries have not kept in line. On account of this, the take-home pay of these doctors most critically associated with health and well-being is going down. (
http://www.gnyha.org/3283/File.aspx).
A perfect example of how disastrous this trend is is to look at New York City hospitals' malpractice insurance, which has gone up 147% in five years, to the point where they are shutting down obstetrics divisions.
The end result of all this is that doctors are being chased into lucrative sub-fields in order to maintain their lifestyle. They have bills to pay, but under our current system, doctors are not paid to make people well, they are paid to perform procedures. Even worse, they are only really paid for the procedures they didn't have to perform on people who cannot pay. Many doctors, to maximize their income, are learning to perform the most expensive procedures possible, and they are competing to get into fields where they don't have to do work that they won't get paid for.
If they paid doctors to make people well, you'd have a lot more GP's, who are the ones on the front lines actually doing this. Instead, the 'winners' in the current system are carving out transplant hearts and vacuuming out fat and stapling stomachs and crowding quickly into any and all available fields where you don't have to do shit for anyone who can't pay, and thus, are not forced to accept the poor people of society as a financial liability. Since medical professionals are all crowding these optional procedure fields as fast as possible, prices for these services are going down. It's not a demonstration of how uninfluenced competition is working to our benefit in some fields as much as it it is another hilarious symptom of a collapsing medical system.
Cosmetic surgeons and the like are the 'winners' of our current system. They do completely optional and expensive procedures, only for people who pay out of pocket, they are not forced to work through thieving bureaucratic intermediaries, they are not forced by financially 'unfortunate' policies to care for those who cannot pay, and despite being under the catchall term of a medical profession, they're a little different -- they are actually all but irrelevant to our general health. They cater only to those who have the excess wealth to spend on optional procedures.
The end result is that the government has already been forced to bribe doctors with taxpayer money to remain as essentially skeleton crews in necessary medical fields which HAVE to be staffed (city hospitals, etc) but nearly NO competent doctor would stay in business in if they were forced to rely upon the profit model. Just about every single top doc in places like North Dakota or Arkansas is essentially bribed by the government with huge amounts of supplemental income to not leave. It's another example of how we're trying inefficiently to sneak in socialized solutions to float the broken moral hazard model and still somehow pretend, for the benefit of some schmucks, that it's seaworthy of its own accord.
PART THE SECOND: HELLO MEDICARE PLEASE KEEP MY ILLUSIONS, PRETENSES, AND PARENTS ALIVE
There's also another issue and it becomes evident when you ask seniors what form of healthcare they want. The big old socialized medical care program called Medicare, known alternately as being 'the most popular program in America' and 'the politically untouchable juggernaut.' Socialism, right here in the heart of the dear old U.S. because private medical care wouldn't touch the issue of care for the elderly.
Why? The elderly have the same sort of issue which leaves orphan diseasers to sit in a corner and die. There is no way to make taking care of old people profitable. Good thing that private insurers get to bypass the issue of maintenance of the elderly.
Thanks, Medicare, for being the big bad socialized medical program that makes 'private' health coverage remotely feasible!
PART THE THIRD: KILL GRANDMA
A free market health care system
can work but only if nothing forces our hospitals and care networks to do anything for those who cannot pay upfront. In a free market system, you either pay or you don't. If you can't pay, you don't get the service. In the case of medical care, if you don't pay, you die. It's tough, but it's the only way the system can work. Right now, medical providers HAVE to treat people regardless of their ability to pay, in life-threatening situations. This fucks the entire system right up. Because uninsured people don't get stuff looked at when it's minor (because they can't afford to pay), they let things get worse, go to the ER, where they either die or live, and in any event run up huge bills. If the hospital can't get that person to pay, they have to make up for the shortfall elsewhere, or go out of business. So everyone else pays higher rates for things. Which FORCES a kind of socialism on the system anyway.
In order to be a good capitalist, you have to kill grandma. If you cannot pay during a life-threatening ordeal, you
have to die. If you don't practice this then all you get is incredibly shitty socialism where everyone ends up absorbing all the costs for the old and the poor anyway even though we're not giving them effective care, just 'necessary' care. Kill grandma. Kill grandma kill grandma and squint real hard and pretend that the mere existence of paltry private charity that will save some people absolves you of any guilt for supporting a system that will leave scores more out on the streets in front of hospitals to die. The problem here is that people's will to actually follow through with their "free market will save the Universe" rhetoric is not strong when faced with an uninsured sick person. Especially an uninsured sick OLD person (who tend to vote in large numbers, and whose population is always increasing) So we start building slipshod systems like Medicare and Medicaid. Kill grandma, otherwise you're a shitty capitalist. You're welcome to say that the free market is the solution to our current woes but you can't pretend that it comes without some extraordinarily worrying sacrifices. If you don't have the balls to kill grandma, then you're going to have to swallow your pride and your 'the free market will save the world' bullshit and stick up for a socialist model.
CONCLUSION
Well, for starters, if you honestly believe that our system is better than a universal health care scheme, or that for reasons of size we would be 'unable' to institute effective universal care here in America, okay, you're being retarded and that's pretty much the long and short of it. The former argument is counter-evidenced by all reasonable metrics, so pursuit of that chain of logic is dissonance with reality of the finest sort; the latter argument is a bald premise evidenced by nothing. Both are blatantly untrue. It's outright stupid to believe them right now.
I care very little about both of those arguments, as they are desperate attempts to prop up an argument that is continuing a guaranteed trek into irrelevance. In the long term, there is no question as to whether or not we will be switching to universal health care. We will. The reason why it is so inevitable is because the current model is collapsing on itself due to issues of medical payment crisis. Hospitals are required to care for people in immediate medical crisis, and it is impossible to make a number of vital civil functions profitable or sustainable, market wise, given that requirement.
The end result is that the government has to prop up urban and rural hospitals with a shitty socialist scheme. As noted, we bribe doctors with taxpayer money to keep them in areas which would otherwise not have doctors. We unabashedly prop the system up. We're just doing this in shitty ways in order to appease the people who want to maintain an illusion that the system works without socialism. This is causing the whole structure to collapse in on it.
To give you a tiny hint about how dire the situation is in America: bankruptcy due to medical crisis remains the single largest cause of bankruptcy in the United States, even during the present time period where the big news is about a financial catastrophe that is causing defaults all over the place.
You read that right: the medical crisis which we've been dealing with for over a decade now has over that timeframe been causing problems still worse than any fallout that the financial crisis has yet achieved. In addition, the financial crisis will throw more and more people into the uninsured category, increasing the costs that the dwindling quantity of insured people have to bear, causing more people to become uninsured. Wow, holy shit, death spiral much?
It's retarded. It's unsustainable. America will have universal health care in our lifetime. And the people who are actively working to prevent this are bankrupt and arguably
morally negligent in their quest to perpetuate a broken, terrible, stupid ideology. They must be opposed along every step.
Support for raising taxes to provide universal coverage has already achieved a large plurality. As more and more people move to support of universal coverage from out of opposition and from being undecided, it will achieve a majority within the year.
If you are American, it's your duty to press for universal health care as hard as you can. It's about the most important issue facing us as citizens. Help make the transition as prompt as we can manage. And, above all, never ever
ever vote for someone who wants to stop universal health care.
If you are not American, it's your duty to continue to mock the
shit out of us and our stupid, worthless medical system, so that we get the idea.
