Health Care by Gunpoint

I have heard it said recently and on several occasions, "if you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's free."

Hillary Clinton has driven that point home today by announcing that she "might be willing" to garnish the wages of those who do not voluntarily purchase health care coverage under her plan.

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to have workers' wages garnisheed if they refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans.

The New York senator has criticized presidential rival Barack Obama for pushing a health plan that would not require universal coverage. Clinton has not always specified the enforcement measures she would embrace, but when pressed during a television interview, she said: "I think there are a number of mechanisms" that are possible, including "going after people's wages, automatic enrollment."

She went on to say that this would apply to those who could afford insurance but chose not to purchase it.

The questions in my mind (if you haven't noticed in reading me before, I always have questions):

1. Who determines whom can afford insurance and whom can't? What are the criteria for making such determinations? What are the lines of demarcation for deciding at what level one can or can not afford?

2. Where will funding for such a regulatory administrative program come from? Will it come from the funding that has been forced from the citizenry by point of the gun by the government or will it come from some other program, which would also, by the way, by funded by taxpayer money (your money)?

3. Are there any plans for addressing the cost of prescription drugs, the high cost of hospital stays, the overcharging of patients for such basic things as Tylenol, bandages, or cotton swabs?

4. It is a proven fact that increasing the levels of bureaucracy only creates more waste and abuse. What does Senator Clinton propose to streamline the nation's health care industry as opposed to further complicating it with a large governmental agency that accomplishes nothing other than to bleed more money from the American taxpayer?

In looking comparatively at the Canadian system, the crumbling British system, and the declining systems of mainland Europe, can we truly not learn from the mistakes of others and determine that we will not go down the same path of failure that others have already traveled?

Or are we so used to having the government tell us how that they know better how to spend our money that we are willing to stake our health care industry (ergo, our very lives) on the competence of yet another governmental bureaucracy?

One should bear well in mind that a bureaucracy is an agency in which it's members are promoted to their level of incompetence. Is this what we want to do to ourselves?

I am not saying that there are not problems with the health care system. Not by any means. What I am saying, however, is DO YOU as an American citizen trust your government with your very life? And WHERE, exactly, does it say in the Constitution that the government has the right to force the citizenry to purchase anything, to the inclusion of health care coverage?

Once and Always, an American Fighting Man


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