Quote Originally Posted by Breukelen advocaat
Rudy Giuliani is in favor of people buying their own health insurance, with the help of "a major tax deduction" and health savings plans.
Of course he's in favor of that. He's a well-to-do, Republican man who will never have to worry where his health insurance comes from--or his tax cuts. He doesn't see any further than his own ability to pay or care about the millions of of people who cannot, and his never-interfere-in-big-business Republican mentality wouldn't dream of actually tackling the real problem of the profit-mongering in Big Insurance/Big Pharma/Big Medicine.

"What the Democrats suggested on this stage two nights ago was Socialized medicine.........The reality of it is that we need a free market......Free market principles are the only things that reduce cost and improve quality. Socialized medicine will ruin medicine in the United States". Rudolph Guiliani
This makes an awfully good sound byte. And folks who are intellectually incapable of listening past sound bytes will certainly buy that, which is what he's counting on. It's the same right-wing scare-tactic misinformation that's been bandied about for years by people who're invested in keeping the outlandish profit system the way it is now.

The threat that "socialized medicine" is going to ruin health care is more of the same. Making health care available and affordable to people in the other civilized countries of the world has done nothing to impair medical quality. Here in our country, we'll still have our state-of-the-art hospitals. We'll still have medical research and development. We'll still be graduating and training physicians and other professionals through the same medical schools and with the same stringent standards. We'll still have unbeaten pharmaceutical products and research. That's not going to change.

The truth is nothing even remotely socialized has yet been proposed, and we already know that the system we'll have to employ in this country will be a cooperative private-public system because it's going to have to use the existing medical infrastructure to a large extent. We can't possibly completely abolish medicine as we know and have enjoyed it because it's too intrinsic to our current economy. It's 16% of our GDP.

Right now, free market principles are precisely what have our health care costs spiraling further and further out of people's reach with each passing year. Those costs are currently rising nearly 10 percent per annum, and with each passing year, that percentage will grow higher and higher. The few of us who can still afford health insurance now may no longer be able to in just three or four more years if we continue on our current course.

Rudy needs to do lots more reading and lots less fear-mongering.