From: mre@teal.Eng.Sun.COM (Mike Eisler)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.canada
Subject: Re: Medicine & Liberty
Date: 5 Oct 1992 21:11:26 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View, CA  USA
NNTP-Posting-Host: teal

In article <672V02FN24nn01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com> jpd10@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com (Michael Surkan) writes:
>  In a country where there is no government medical system
>(ie. NOT the USA) and people must pay for everything
>themselves (a totally fictitious place) people would be free
>to make their own decisions on how to spend their money. I
>like using the example of a young 24 year old lady with a
>good job who decides to blow $2,000.00 on the down payment
>for a new sports car instead of paying medical insurance
>premiums. If it so happens that this very dame gets creamed
>by a lorry as she is driving the car off the lot and dies
>because she didn't have insurance coverage for necessary
>operations I maintain that she has the RIGHT TO DIE.

Well you don't specify whether she was at fault in the above mishap.
Assuming she was totally to blame, then no, she does not have the right.
to live.

What if the woman in fact was sitting in her parked sports car, minding
her own business, and some drunk without liability insurance totals her
and the car.  I maintain she has the right to live in this case.

Now how is a hospital that gets half alive stiffs in the emergency room
supposed to discriminate between those that are insured, those that
aren't, but it isn't their fault, and those aren't and are at fault?

When comes down to a live and death issue, emergency care providers are
morally obligated to provide the service, and worry about payment
later.  Without universal insurance, individual providers can get stuck
with large bills, which are passed onto society as a whole.  Without
universal insurance, the poor must often wait till trivial (inexpensive
to treat) maladies develop into life-threatening maladies (expensive to
treat) before a doctor will treat them. The person who is allowed the
decision to not buy health insurance will end up costing society (i.e.
me) down the road.

>  In Canada, that fundamental right to make your own
>decisions has been taken away. The Government has declared
>that all people must have medical care and they will make
>you pay your insurance premiums, like it or not (in the form
>of taxes)! Where does the right to make decisions (ie. spend
>our money how we bloody well please) come into the equation?

The government decides lots of other things. That you will be protected
from violence and theft by your neighbours and enemy nations, that you
will be protected from unscrupulous banks, that you will be provided
with paved roads and controlled intersections, etc. Perhaps you should
be allowed the right to buy your own police and armies, build your own
roads, and hire an auditor to check up on your bank, but I doubt you'll
have enough money. I know, you could pool your assets with a group of
other people and do it. Well you've just created a country, and
government to boot.

>  The underlying problem which causes medical expenses to
>fly through the roof at an exponential rate is the never-
>ending advances in medical science. However much people wish
>to ignore this, the more advances to be made in science the
>more the cumulative costs of health care rise. We would like

I don't think that improvements in medical technology are a valid
excuse for the skyrocketing costs of medicine. I'm posting this article
from a computer with ~1 giga byte of disk storage, 16 mega bytes of
main storage, and tens of millions of HZ of processing speed. The
theory of computation existed in 1910 (eg. Charles Babbage), but I
doubt if the gross national product (in 1910) of the U.S.A. was enough
in those days to build such a marvel (assuming that one built thousands
of difference engines to replicate the millions of HZ). This box
probably lists for around $5000 today.

>to think that a new break-through will replace old
>treatments and actually cut expenses. This, however, is not
>true for the most part. If we discover a cure for
>Alzheimer's  we will simply have one more disease added to
>the list of curable ailments.

If average cost of the cure for Alzheimer's is as much as $100,000 this
is still cheaper than the cost of current alternatives.

I think the reasons why medicine is getting more expensive are:

	(1) market forces don't apply.  If a the price of a shirt
		is unreasonable to me, I can decide to get it somewhere
		else.  If the shirt is the same price everywhere, then
		I can decide to do without. If enough other people feel
		the same way, the shirt will go on sale some time in
		the future. If not, well I guess I don't buy the shirt.
		With medicine, you sometimes can't wait, and you almost
		can never do without, unless you are willing to die.
		Insurance providers are forced to pay the bill because
		they promised they would when I bought the policy.

	(2) rising malpractice claims

	(3) liability insurance due to (2)

>it here. In my dreams I think of a land where a man can
>truly be free again. Perhaps Hong Kong?

You aren't aware of 1997? Perhaps you should stay conscious more
often.

>
>                     Michael Surkan

	-Mike Eisler
	mre@Eng.Sun.Com
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