More impudent thoughts on health care

• Pres. Obama is claiming to anyone who'll listen that the Democrat's health plan will squeeze hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and inefficiency out of the Medicare & Medicaid systems ("I've also proposed saving another $313 billion in Medicare and Medicaid spending in several other ways."). How about you start with that. Make those changes and only those changes. Once you've saved $300B (materially, not just as an accounting trick) maybe we can talk. Don't promise me you'll save that money *after* you spend it on something else -- that's just a great way for you to screw me twice.
• I need to do some research and some math, but everyone on the other side loves tossing numbers around that are refutable. Like 50M uninsured, and U.K has better health care because they have longer life expectancies. 20M of the 50M are illegal immigrants, let's start with that. Life expectencies are very close, about 1 year difference. Are homicides and car accidents health care failures? In the USA, we drive much farther on average than they do in the UK, you can get statistics on vehicle deaths per 1000 miles driven, and you can work out how many additional deaths per year are due simply to more fatal car accidents per capita due to more miles per capita. Similar math for homicides.
  

Impudent thoughts on health care

• Why not simply expand Medicaid to cover more of these "poor" people who can't afford health insurance?

• Why not build some hospitals, hire some doctors & nurses, then open the doors to anyone who wants "free" health care?
• Why are so many of the same people who are crying about our carbon footprints and how humans are killing the earth also trying to get health care for everyone? Wouldn't it be better if fewer people survived to continue to rape the planet?
  
• If health care is a basic human right, where was my right to an MRI fifty years ago?
• There's a name for forcing other people to provide for your wants and (so-called) needs...starts with an 's'...
• Why is there a plan to tax soda and other junk food, ostensibly to fight obesity and reduce health care costs when it's made with corn syrup, which we subsidize farmers to grow?
• Health care as we know it is a recent invention (see MRI above) and heavily dependent on technology. If a "fundamental human right" can attach to something that was invented last decade that we've decided is simply too important to live without, what's next? Public option iPhone?
• If it is a "fundamental human right" don't we have a duty, responsibility, obligation to render this to all humans? There's more than 6B people outside the US that we owe this to, too?
• If I can force others to provide me with health care, as is my "right", can I force others to pay for my arms--as in right to keep and bear? Please deliver my taxpayer funded M-16 and supply of ammunition.
• Everyone dies. It's folly to expend resources in a sky's-the-limit attempt to get each and every person a few more minutes, hours, days, months or even years.
• Presumably, a "fundamental human right" comes without limits, so my "free" health care will be all-I-can-eat. So maybe I'll be able to eat all-I-can-eat and smoke and drink all I can too, after all, the financial consequences of doing so will not be mine to bear. Once you admit to some limits, we're just arguing over degrees*.
  
• If technology someday soon provides a pill that will provide 100% cure for and prevatative against contracting cancer, HIV, hep, and a slew of other diseases but costs $500,000 each dose (say it's made from comet dust, just that it costs that much even with the manufacturer making zero profit), will it be covered? For everyone? What if the pill is only good for one year, and you need a booster every year at another $500k per?
• The phrase is "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"...
• If a) Congress's new plan will not force me to buy insurance and b) will forbid any insurance company from denying me coverage for a preexisting condition, why shouldn't I wait until I got sick or hurt before signing up and paying premiums?

* There's an old joke:
He: "Would have sex with me for $1 million?"
She: "Yes."
He: "Would have sex with me for $10?"
She: "No way! What do you think I am?"
He: "Oh, we've already established what you are, now we're just haggling over the price."