The impending universal health care will be the crowning glory of the Left, whose philosophy, apparently, is “If the poor can’t have it, no one can.”

Liberals like to talk of bringing down the ‘costs’ of healthcare, but what they mean is making it cost the consumer less. That is actually bringing down the price and will have absolutely no effect on the cost of providing health care. The cost of health care includes the cost of educating a doctor, of discovering a new cure, of creating a medicine. There is a cost in human capital as well; it takes years for all of these things to be achieved and during those years, people are working at those goals rather than expending their effort elsewhere.

The price of health care, on the other hand, is what a particular procedure, drug or office visit is valued at in order to cover the costs already paid and make it worthwhile to continue providing such a service or product.

Ask yourself this: How much would you have to anticipate earning in ten years, if it meant you would spend all of those years in school and residency, frequently working 18 hours at a stretch, then graduate with $100,000.00 in debt to undertake a job that had you getting up all hours of the night responding to a pager, holding people’s lives in your hands and dreading the day when the first malpractice suit would land on your desk?

If one man invests three million dollars and another just three thousand into the same fund paying 10% returns, the man who risked three million will get a much higher dollar amount for his investment. In the same way, a man who invests years of his life and much personal risk in becoming a brain surgeon will earn a much higher dollar amount than a man who went to a fast food joint and stagnated there. There is a good reason that McDonalds’ cashiers do not drive Porsches.

This is the point in the argument where liberals will shift the focus to the poor beleaguered cashier who, in their tale, will always have dreamed of greatness but been kept down by the ubiquitous demon “Society.” Do not get sidetracked…this is not about him or how sad it is that he is a burger flipper at 35 with six kids and a wife to support. The question is not what to do for burger flippers who wish they made as much as doctors, the question is, “Who will become doctors when they are getting paid like burger flippers?”

Universal Healthcare is coming, however they want to play semantics. The newest stealth move is to say we will provide a government competitor. What is the point of a government competitor if it is not cheaper for people to use? If it is cheaper then it will eventually bankrupt the private sector. 

What about the payments? I have worked for a physician who routinely abandoned efforts to seek reimbursement from Medicaid, so it is no great bargain for a physician to be on the government’s “Preferred Provider” list. At what point will the government pass legislation requiring all doctors to accept this lousy insurance plan?

For consumers it is not much better. When I myself was a Medicaid patient during a pregnancy in 2002, I was recommended to a kidney specialist because my blood tests showed a possible adrenal tumor. The only specialist in the tri-state area I could go to with my government plan was a nightmare. The offices were furnished with ancient gynecological exam tables and the walls looked like they had last been painted in the seventies. The air in the place reeked of the mildew I could see all around the vents in the walls. He looked at my chart, took my blood pressure and announced I had to “have the baby as soon as possible.” I was 20 weeks pregnant. He informed me that with my condition I would need surgery that could not be performed while I was pregnant and so the baby needed to be born within the next week or two.

Back at home I contacted my OB-GYN who assured me this was not so. I continued the pregnancy to term and delivered a beautiful, healthy little boy. It turned out my hormone levels were off due to a pituitary disturbance. A low-carb diet eradicated all symptoms and I have lived seven years without surgery for the tumors that were not even there.

This is the quality of physician you can expect to see when we all have Uncle Sam’s health insurance, and the costs of becoming a quality physician are not worth the price that may be charged.

The move to make health care ‘more affordable’ is just a nice way of saying ‘control prices.’ Does anyone have the foggiest notion of how well that worked with gasoline? You know: long lines, shorter business hours, alternate days you could fill ‘er up?

Who will invest $800 million to develop a new medicine when they cannot make a buck on it? The very greed of capitalists has allowed the astounding and accelerating improvement of the health of all Americans over the past century. There was a time when the richest man alive could not get an antibiotic. Now anyone can get one for four dollars at Wal-Mart.

Universal health care will not mean that the poor will get treatment as good as the rich get. It will mean that even the rich cannot have the quality of care possible today. It will also mean that the poor, who under a free market would see prices for expensive procedures fall over time until even they could afford it, will never have it either.

More and more, the rhetoric of the far Left is leading me to believe that is good enough for them. They are collectivists at heart, and what is important is that no one be better off than anyone else. Well Bravo! There will be no “Health Care Gap” when we are all dying together.