Quote Originally Posted by carinia
There are a lot of things that could be done with this health care bill, but its going to end with a lot of pork.
aside from the basic ideological argument against socialized medicine, this is the fundamental flaw in any step that takes any industry out of the private sector and places it into the hands of the state. CORRUPTION. while corruption is not the sole property of political animals, it is far more prevalent and harder to root out wherever they have the most power. trading influence for the support of backers and favors for votes, the denizens of the governmental bureaucracy have turned the concept of public service into nothing more than a power grab and the public welfare into an excuse to create unwieldy and nearly opaque fiefdoms. "health care reform" is a misnomer, carefully crafted to give the people a scapegoat to vent their frustration upon.

true reform would begin with the root causes for the high cost of health care. multi-million dollar payouts for medical errors, nonsensical and unevenly applied regulation, and a culture that esteems doctors and lawyers with near reverence and awe. activist judges, pushing an agenda of wealth redistribution, and bleeding heart juries, hoping that theirs may be the next big payoff, cost the industry billions of dollars in extravagant judgments and the necessary malpractice protection for simple human error and that can't help but be reflected in our medical bills and the general attitude of the industry. lawyers get rich on both sides of such audacious and often frivolous lawsuits and, with a government run by and beholden to the legal profession, no one is in any great hurry to do anything about it. the general public, caught up in the fervor of entitlement and the new american dream of something for nothing, must reassess the concept of fault and quit blaming the wealthy for the plight of the poor, but such a paradigm shift can never occur as long as we are so willingly hypnotized by the blame laying of self-serving politicians and their media lap dogs.

ultimately, it is the people themselves that are to blame for this so-called health care crisis. the greed created by a sense of entitlement to all the best and an apathy that leads to buck passing has stripped us of our power within the marketplace. the people are not entitled to medical care, merely to access to that care. we do not support those who spend years of their lives training to enter the medical profession, so we must pay them for that effort at whatever price the market will bear. we cannot expect the animals of government to force an industry to conform to standards that we do not demand they conform to themselves.