John McCain and Health Insurance

I am just watching CNN break into its regular programming to cover the press conference about Senator John McCain’s successful surgery to remove his melanomas.

I am wondering about his health insurance. As a member of Congress, and a veteran, of course, he is completely covered. And this is a previously existing condition, too.

I am thinking about those whose health insurance does not cover previously existing conditions, or the 30 to 40 million who have no health insurance, at all!

Everyone in Canada is covered, and are covered for pre-existing conditions. Maybe there is no point to insuring that all people have the same access to health care as members of Congress do, or as all Canadians do. Maybe it harms their moral fibre to give them something they haven’t worked for.

Why is there so much controversy about this? Why is single payer so evil?

Isn’t the way things are evil?

---

Let's see now. Cancer care, because it is so expenxive, shouldn't be convered by a national medical insurance--so if you're poor, you die a horrible death.

Not to mention the fact, the bulk of chemicals used in chemotherapy today were invedted/discovered by the National Institutes of Health, and turned over to the private sector, free of charge, because the philosophy governing the U.S. Government is,

Let the taxpaper take the risk; let the private sector reap the rewards!

My point remains: If you really want an economy to work, then you can't afford to waste anyone, certainly not 40 million people.

P.S. After years and years of budget cuts, to a system that is much less expensive, per person, the the American system (single payer has far less inflation than Multiple-payer private sector) is cut through the bone. Only ideologues, who have little reality, call for further cuts--unless their ideology cannot admit, in the face of all logic, evidence, and simple common sense, that single payer is better.

O, DMan, I thought you had quit. Gotta stomp down on a country you haven't been in since when...?

There are two fundamentally different ways to look at health insurance. The first is that it's a basic human right, the same as free speech and a democratic vote and the right to pursue a livelyhood in a capitalist economy. The second is that it's a service, and an expensive one at that, the same as plumbing repair and cable television and dial-up internet connectivity.

People who argue the first viewpoint think that the government should tax everyone for this particular service, because it's so vital to our fundamental survival in a modern society. People who argue the second viewpoint are usually the ones who have to earn a living from it.

The truth, as with so many other things, lies somewhere in between. Things like vaccines and eyeglasses and regular life-saving physicals should be considered basic rights in first-world nations. But I can't support the viewpoint that expensive treatments like like those used for cancer should be supported with nationwide taxes. We've got enough to worry about in the United States trying to get Social Security stabilized again; adding full unlimited medical care for the entire Baby Boomer generation would bankrupt the country in about three weeks.