Instead, there is a third-party system. It is a communist system and it has a communist result. — Milton Friedman.

INTRO: My personal Doubts
After I got out of the military, I was NAILED hard by the loss of my government provided health care. My wife got hospitalized. She had to have her gall bladder removed which is pretty routine but then there were complications because they thought there was a clot in her calf which could have resulted in a pulmonary embolism (which can kill). She recovered. But when I got bill I thought I would going to have a pulmonary embolism. I realized that health care was going to be MAJOR problem for us, a middle class American family. I know there is a problem… but how health care be fixed.

Is the Federal Government Competent Enough to do Universal Health Care?
I’ve been working in the federal government for over a decade and it never ceases to amaze me how inept the feds can be with certain projects. Sometimes the bureaucracy makes on overhead that makes the actual product useless. So when I heard that the Democrats were making another hard push toward Universal “Federalized” Health Care, I shuddered at the thought. Don’t get me wrong, there are some successful federal projects. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (introduced by Senator Albert Gore Sr. in the 1950s) which created all the Interstate highways across the US turned out to be a great idea. High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (HPCA) was another great idea (introduced by another Al Gore Jr.).

Incidentally: Gore’s legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet’s technological springboard. ‘If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn’t have happened,’ Andreessen says of Gore’s bill, ‘at least, not until years later.’ A misquote from Gore is what spawned the “Al Gore created the Internet” joke. — Wikipedia Gore Bill

So not EVERYTHING that government empowers dies.

Liberty vs Socialization
The fundamental issue is Individual Liberty versus Socialization. The typical Libertarian is violently against “Socialized” Health Care. They see the uses of the phrase “Universal” health care as a lofty way of talking about something very evil and the phrase “Free” Health Care as a complete lie. On some level they are right. It will not cover every single person and it will NOT be free. Some one will pay full price.. that that someone is EVERYONE. I agree with the Libertarians, but I also think they are not living in the real world. The truth is the United States is already socialized. With greater technology, the prices of medical care should have gone down, but it is going up faster than the rate of inflation X3. Libertarians attribute this to the FDA, Medicare, physician licensing, insurance regulations. They would say that these should be banished and that would fix the cost problem because the market fixes everything. What they are saying is probably true, however it would take the political will of the American Republic to change our very socialistic society. Like it or not Medicare is here to stay until the majority of Baby Boomers are gone because they are NOT going to let that (or Social Security) die.
Here is Ronald Reagan brilliantly presenting a conservative view on socialized medicine.

Problems with “Socialized Health Care”:
Since not all Socialized Health Care systems are the same. We will assume that this is the best working example in the USA, the Massachusetts CommonWealth Health Care system (the world is watching Mass.)

1) The rising prices of medical costs will be imposed on ALL citizens by possible higher taxes (now being experienced in Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Health Care system)
2) Citizens MUST have health insurance (treated like care insurance) or be fined
3) State will have more control of your health care than the market. So you will be MORE dependent on the state for your needs.

The Cure: How Capitalism Can Cure Americas Socialist Health Care System by Dr. David Gratzer
We have a socialist-communist system of distributing medical care. Instead of letting people hire their own physicians and pay them, no one pays his or her own medical bills. Instead, there’s a third party payment system. It is a communist system and it has a communist result. Despite this, we’ve had numerous miracles in medical science. From the discovery of penicillin, to new surgical techniques, to MRIs and CAT scans, the last 30 or 40 years have been a period of miraculous change in medical science. On the other hand, we’ve seen costs skyrocket. Nobody is happy: physicians don’t like it, patients don’t like it. Why? Because none of them are responsible for themselves. You no longer have a situation in which a patient chooses a physician, receives a service, gets charged, and pays for it. There is no direct relation between the patient and the physician. The physician is an employee of an insurance company or an employee of the government. Today, a third party pays the bills. As a result, no one who visits the doctor asks what the charge is going to be—somebody else is going to take care of that. The end result is third party payment and, worst of all, third party treatment.” - Milton Friedman Some of the nation’s top health policy experts gathered in Albany on Sept. 26, 2006 to share ideas on how to curb health care expenses, improve health care services and expand access to health insurance in New York State. Featured topics included innovative Medicaid reforms in Florida and Kentucky, the Massachusetts health insurance reform plan, the pitfalls of a Canada-style universal health plan, and the potential benefits of expanding consumer health care choices. In this presentation, keynoter David Gratzer, MD Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute Center for Medical Progress and author of “The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care” discusses solutions to the ills of the Canadian and American Health Care Systems.

A CASE FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE
Our Health Care system certainly needs help

The United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide Universal Health care. The US has the same publicly funded health care programs for years: For military families, military retirees, Medicaid, and Medicare. As a result:

* Fact One: The United States ranks 23rd in infant mortality, down from 12th in 1960 and 21st in 1990
* Fact Two: The United States ranks 20th in life expectancy for women down from 1st in 1945 and 13th in 1960
* Fact Three: The United States ranks 21st in life expectancy for men down from 1st in 1945 and 17th in 1960.
* Fact Four: The United States ranks between 50th and 100th in immunizations depending on the immunization. Overall US is 67th, right behind Botswana
* Fact Five: Outcome studies on a variety of diseases, such as coronary artery disease, and renal failure show the United States to rank below Canada and a wide variety of industrialized nations.

The United States - which spends more on Health Care than most Industrialized countries and still placed 17th in 175 Country survey. – According to World Markets Research Center

Ironically, the US the most technologically and pharmaceutically advanced country in the world, some 40 million of its population are without health insurance, have problems accessing healthcare and are leading increasingly sedentary lifestyles

Mitt Romney talks about Commonwealth Health Care

Works Cited:
Healthiest Countries -
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4025

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/03/25/health/main504582.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_health_reform_law