save –verb

1. the fallacious suggestion of decreased costs which excludes from consideration an inevitable trend towards DMV-quality service, severely muted market competition, an army of new bureaucratic goons, the introduction of inestimable stress to everyday life, an exodus of talented professionals, skyrocketing taxes and/or skyrocketing inflation, and an inevitable *increase* in all associated costs for all involved parties: The healthcare bill will save Americans money.

• Health-care reform and the mixed economy
• What the “Affordable Health Care for America Act,” HR 3962, Actually Says
• How to stop losing the health-care debate

(HT Diana Hsieh)

Dear Senator {Your Senator} –

I am thoroughly disgusted with your vote in favor of the health care bill.

The lives and health of Americans depend on freedom in medicine. We need politicians willing to see that government controls, regulations, and welfare are the source of today’s high-cost, bureaucratic medicine — and brave enough to advocate for repeal.

Instead, we have you and your pork-loving, vote-buying, economic-illiterate, moral-degenerate, freedom-destroying colleagues in the Senate.

Shame on you. You all deserve to be voted out of office as soon as possible.

In Utter Disgust,

{Your Name}

Find your senator here and let ‘em have it.

When government-run “competitors” are funded by tax revenues, and immune to the same economics and regulations that the freer-market is subject to, the real competition is eliminated.

Phase two is much worse.

The remaining “only option” is a dysfunctional charade of entrenched mediocrity immune to the requirement of customer satisfaction - essentially like our “only option” public schools. Except that in the case of health care, financial negligence, social engineering, lowering standards, and stifling innovation (all hallmarks of socialized endeavors) will cause more immediate loss of life instead of the living death imposed by socialized education.

I found noteworthy this passage from Leonard Peikoff’s chapter ‘Medicine: The Death of a Profession’ in The Voice Of Reason:

“The DRG administrator will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don’t—and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO, favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can’t afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won’t authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital—and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can’t get a specialist’s advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn’t even take this patient, he’s so sick—after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges…”

Meanwhile, the patient (maybe you or your loved one) dies…

This hypothetical, but factually warranted, scenario was from a lecture given back in 1985, so imagine if we adjust the cognitive and ethical nightmare presented above to accommodate an additional 25 years of cancerous government involvement. Consider how much worse it will be when the few remaining slivers of freedom are completely ground into the muck of full government control.

Keep in mind the scenario portrayed above, along with the highlighted acronyms, when you next hear some righteous idiot condemn the “free” health care market.

In a free market of healthcare, the only relevant decisions are amongst the physician and the patient to determine the most appropriate course of action available in accordance with the rational judgment and financial means of both parties. Freedom, efficiency, objectivity and justice are the guiding principles one needs when his life is on the line, not subjective deliberation, bureaucratic pandering, systemic injustice and economic dysfunction.

Another variant phrase in support of this:

Suppose one could demonstrably claim increased innovation, lowered costs, and a dramatic universal increase in both quantity (life expectancy) and quality of life – the fact remains that socialized medicine is a system rooted in the wholesale encroachment of individual rights. There is no combination of practical angles that outweigh the moral essence. There is no scope of benevolence reaped by one man or one million that can justify forcefully clobbering a single right of another individual.

• Obama Cronies vs. American Citizens: Whose Medical Decisions?: Part I
  

  There was a time when rushing a thousand-page bill through Congress so fast that no one has time to read it would have provoked public outrage. But now, this has been attempted twice in the first 6 months of a new administration.
  The fact that they got away with it before, with the “stimulus” bill, may have led them to believe that they could get away with it again. But the first bill simply spent hundreds of billions of dollars.

  The current “health care” bill threatens to take life-and-death decisions out of the hands of individuals and their doctors, transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.

  People are taking that personally– as they should. Your life and death, and that of your loved ones, is as personal as it gets.

• Obamacare’s Phony Arguments: Whose Medical Decisions?: Part II
  

  The logic of their collectivist thinking– and the actual practice in some other countries with government-controlled health care– is that you cannot even pay for some medical treatments with your own money, if the powers that be decide that “society” cannot let its resources be used that way, or that it would not be “social justice” for some people to have medical treatments that others cannot get, just because some people “happen to have money.”

• Obama’s “Bait and Switch”: Whose Medical Decisions?: Part III
  

  Despite incessant repetition of the fact that millions of Americans do not have medical insurance, hardy souls who have actually read the mammoth medical care legislation being rushed through Congress have discovered all sorts of things there that have nothing whatever to do with insuring the uninsured– and everything to do with taking medical decisions out of the hands of doctors and their patients, and transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.

I know nothing else about congressman Mike Rogers, but this dialogue was right on the money.

On the health care “debate” is summed nicely with the following excerpt:

The Virtue Of Selfishness: Chapter 10 - ‘Collectivized Ethics’

…The hallmark of such mentalities is the advocacy of some grand scale public goal, without regard to context, costs or means. Out of context, such a goal can usually be shown to be desirable; it has to be public, because the costs are not to be earned, but to be expropriated; and a dense patch of venomous fog has to shroud the issue of means—because the means are to be human lives.

“Medicare” is an example of such a project. [Or socialization of health care to any degree]

“Isn’t it desirable that the aged should have medical care in times of illness?” its advocates clamor.

Considered out of context, the answer would be: yes, it is desirable. Who would have a reason to say no? And it is at this point that the mental processes of a collectivized brain are cut off; the rest is fog. Only the desire remains in his sight—it’s the good, isn’t it?-it’s not for myself, it’s for others, it’s for the public, for a helpless, ailing public… The fog hides such facts as the enslavement and, therefore, the destruction of medical science, the regimentation and disintegration of all medical practice, and the sacrifice of the professional integrity, the freedom, the careers, the ambitions, the achievements, the happiness, the lives of the very men who are to provide that “desirable” goal—the doctors.

After centuries of civilization, most men—with the exception of criminals—have learned that the above mental attitude is neither practical nor moral in their private lives and may not be applied to the achievement of their private goals. There would be no controversy about the moral character of some young hoodlum who declared:

“Isn’t it desirable to have a yacht, to live in a penthouse and to drink champagne?”—and stubbornly refused to consider the fact that he had robbed a bank and killed two guards to achieve that “desirable” goal.

There is no moral difference between these two examples; the number of beneficiaries does not change the nature of the action, it merely increases the number of victims. In fact, the private hoodlum has a slight edge of moral superiority: he has no power to devastate an entire nation and his victims are not legally disarmed.

[emphasis and comments added]