Death panels
by John T. Reed

Sign up now!
Click here to receive free updates on headline news from John T. Reed

View Cart

Featured Products

	Succeeding
	1 year Subscription to Real Estate Investor's Monthly
	Distressed Real Estate Times
	How to Get Started in Real Estate
	How to Buy Real Estate for at Least 20% Below Market Value
Checkout
How to Order

Everyone dies

You will eventually die. Health care and life-style improvements can prolong life in most cases. That’s all.

Many people will suffer an injury or illness for which expensive medical therapies (e.g., medicine, surgery) may prolong life and/or improve the quality of the patient’s life.

If you can afford the therapy in question, perhaps through your insurance, the decision on whether to have the therapy done is yours alone.

If you cannot afford the therapy by yourself, either you must forego it or find someone else to pay for it. If you have to find someone else to pay for it, one or more persons who have that money will decide whether to pay for it.

If there is more than one decision maker, and the therapy in question relates to prolonging your life, the group of decision makers is fairly called a “death panel.”

In other situations, it could be called a “pain panel” or a “quality of life panel.”

Your family

The person or group of people who decide whether you get the therapy in question when you cannot afford it by yourself may be your family. How that works out is between you and them.

Charity

The only alternative outside your family is charity including government charity. So if you and and/or your family cannot afford the therapy in question, you must go hat in hand to a charity or the government to ask them to please pay for your therapy.

Entitlement?

Politicians, especially Democrats, have encouraged voters to believe health care is an entitlement. That is a childlike fairy tale. Health care is expensive. It is only an entitlement if you purchase insurance from a reputable adequately financially strong company that agrees in the policy terms to pay for the therapy in question and you pay the premiums necessary for that company to afford the therapy for you and other members of the insured group of people.

If the government simply decrees that you are entitled to a health care blank check, and you support such a government, you are accomplishing nothing but sending your country down the road to bankruptcy.

There is no free lunch. Someone has to pay for your health care. Simply voting for politicians who promise to make someone other than you pay for it is childish. I saw a quote in the media that total confiscation of 100% of the profits of all the corporations in America would not be enough to pay for even one year of universal health care. Furthermore, anything remotely resembling that would cause all of those corporations to go out of business for lack of incentive to continue.

In other words, you’re going to die. How soon depends on your luck and/or how well you take care of yourself. Many Americans will die sooner or suffer poorer quality of life because of lack of enough money to pay for every therapy for everybody that might prolong life, mitigate pain, or improve quality of life.

The only choice we have is whether the decision will be made by you, a family “panel,” and insurance-company panel, or a government panel. Clearly, you are better off if the decision is made by you or your family. Beyond that, a private insurance company is better than a government panel because government is political and politicians make decisions based on politics. Government death panels will favor politicians, important supporters, and key voting blocs. Under Obama, expect government death panels to be contain mainly ACORN members, union members, trial lawyers, government employees, academics, Democrat party officials, and so on. They will place teir own political power before your interests. They always have throughout the history of mankind.

The correct health care policy is for citizens who want it to buy major medical insurance (possibly in the form of Blue Cross or HMO membership) to cover the most expensive procedures. All government health care programs should be ended including Medicare, Medicaid, VA, Congress, and so on. Why? The government does not have enough money to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. They have enough money to pay for the VA and Congress, but those are unfair to the taxpayers. The VA should only pay for line-of-duty veteran injuries or illnesses, not all veteran medical care. The government is even more inefficient—far more inefficient—than insurance companies and private hospitals.

People should pay for procedures other than major ones out of their own pocket. That is how we handle other necessities like food, clothing, cars, pets, farm animals, and shelter. It will result in the lowest costs because when people pay out of their own pocket, they shop around for the best prices thereby triggering downward competitive pressures on prices. The current high cost problem stems from costs being paid by people other than the patients. The system I am advocating is approximately the way Americans got health care in the 1950s, early 1960s, and before. It was not the intolerable disaster advocates of Obama care claim. I was there. So were you or your ancestors unless you emigrated here since then.

John T. Reed