Truth 
in politics. 
What a concept!

End the Two Trillion Dollar Health Care Boondoggle 

I’m probably the only Libertarian candidate in history to advocate single-payer health care. Am I crazy? Hannity and O’Reilly may think so. But I think we’d have to be crazy to keep this overpriced, inefficient, murderous health care system we’ve got now. 

I support single-payer health care because I am a fiscal conservative. Today we spend $7,000 per person every year on health care. Canada, which has single payer health care, spends $3,000 and its people live longer than ours do. 

We’re paying more than twice as much for health care as Canada, England, Sweden, France, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany, and dozens of other countries. And guess what? People live longer in those countries than they do here! In the USA, medical treatment is actually one of the leading causes of death. That’s because people who have good insurance are given unnecessary treatment—even unnecessary operations—just to line the pockets of the doctors and the hospitals. Meanwhile, those with no coverage who need treatment can’t get it. And those unfortunate enough to have a serious problem, and serious medical bills, often lose their houses and everything they own.  

Check out Michael Moore’s Sicko. I don’t agree with Michael about everything. But he’s right about this: The USA is paying twice as much as everybody else, and getting a lousy, fourth-rate product in return. 

I say it’s crazy to pay twice as much for an inferior product. If you’re doing that, you need to shop around! And if you shop around and look at the different health care systems in different countries, it’s obvious that some form of national health care is the way to go. 

I favor single-payer health care, not socialized medicine. What's the difference? In socialized medicine (England, France, Cuba) the government runs the whole thing and you can't choose your doctor. In single-payer health care (Canada) the government is the payer, not the owner. Single-payer health care just means expanding Medicare to cover everybody. You'll be able to choose your doctor, and there will be no rationing, no co-pay, and full drug coverage. And it will cost much less than we're paying now. How can that be? Because the 300 private insurance companies are paying 20-30% overhead, while Medicare pays only 3% overhead.  

We can easily save $300 billion per year on overhead by going to single-payer. We save even more by reinstating the ban on TV drug advertising, negotiating drug prices as Canada does, requiring hospitals to be nonprofit, and emphasizing prevention of major problems rather than treating them after they're already major problems.  

We can pay for single payer health care—which could cost roughly half what we're paying now—through an employer payroll tax, which is basically the same way most people get their coverage now. But instead of the hundreds of bloated, wasteful, high-overhead, profit-making companies sucking our health dollars, we'll have one low-overhead outfit offering universal coverage.  

That's why if you're a true fiscal conservative, you should support single-payer health care coverage. For details, check out http://www.pnhp.org/. 

Since there's nothing in the Constitution specifically allowing the federal government to institute single-payer health care (or Social Security or Medicare or the income tax) I would like to see it instituted either through states banding together, or after it has been authorized by an amendment to the Constitution. We need to re-establish Constitutional rule in this country.  

Along with single-payer coverage of basic health care – the simple, obvious stuff where it's inarguable that you need to see a doctor - we should keep the government out of medicine. And we should keep the government out of the herbs and supplements business and allow alternative health care practitioners to do their jobs. Personally, I stay away from doctors, who are one of the leading causes of death, and instead listen to my alternative practitioner. Did you know that doctors and the medicine they prescribe kill more people every five days than terrorists have killed in a century? Ivan Illich, my favorite social philosopher, has argued, based on a careful analysis of statistics, that doctors kill and sicken as much as they cure, suggesting that we would be just as healthy if we completely eliminated them. That may be an overstatement – but I think Illich's book Medical Nemesis is the most important thing ever written about modern medicine. You can read it free here.

TOP