Many of you talk as though access to healthcare is a right. Is it? I am sure that most
of us would support giving a helping hand to certain unfortunate individuals who
through no fault of their own fell upon hard times; but what about others? For example, some
JWs who elect to avoid education and the skilled job market that would have provided
healthcare insurance to say nothing of retirement benefits for them and their families?
Should all of society be required to pay for the healthcare that some refuse
to work to obtain? I’m not so sure.
A few years ago I became seriously ill. My local physician could provide limited
therapy. He recommended a large healthcare facility several hundred miles away,
but the doctors there did not want to care for me (I was still trying to be a good
little JW at the time). I found a center over a thousand miles away that offered
to care for me. If government had been running healthcare at the time I probably
would have had little choice in where I was cared for, plus in the eyes of some here
would have been too old to qualify for the expensive care that was required. It was
private healthcare insurance of the PPO variety that I had carried for years that paid
all but a few thousand dollars of my care. I had choice, I picked my doctors and I
picked my hospitals. Government stayed out of it.
Government runs the VA healthcare system in the United States. Many here know
of the inadequate job that the VA often does. The recent Walter Reed scandal is a
prime example.
Private insurance adds too much bureaucracy sometimes; I will
hate to see still more layers of bureaucracy added by more government intervention,
but that is what we will probably see in the US. We usually get the government we
deserve rather then the government we really want.