Op-Ed: Obamacare

And therein lies the problem with a socialized form of medical care. When you force doctors to accept lower than normal rates for their care, and impose a 4% tax, eventually the level of care will go down. Having medical care for each citizen of the United States is fantastic idea, don't get me wrong. But hurting the doctors by cutting their income both makes it hard for those in a private practice to stay in business, and over time will create little incentive for doctors to become specialists in their fields because the cost of medical school on top of malpractice insurance and costs for certain pieces of equipment. So instead of getting the medical care you need from a specialist, you're going to get a shrug from a general practitioner of the government's choice, who couldn't afford to go into the field he/she really wanted to because of this crappy new form of healthcare. Which means, no OB/GYN available when you're pregnant, many undiagnosed illnesses, and waiting months for surgery. On a personal note, as a pre-med student and halfway EMT-B certified, I'm not looking forward to the amount of pregnant women we're going to run calls for because they couldn't find an OB/GYN or a hospital bed to have their babies. Nor am I looking forward to the increased influx of calls for people with undiagnosed heart conditions who will experience cardiac failures/hypoperfusion etc. In short, socialized medical care can s my d.

And therein lies the problem. People who oppose socialized medicine, like the author and the first poster, accurately describe certain inefficiencies and shortages that result from it. BUT, they offer NO solution for the insurance mess and 50 million uninsured. Seems like they are very worried about their own standards of care going down, but somehow they don't seem any sensitive to the plight of uninsured. When you divide the pie among more, everyone gets a smaller pie... is the nation ready for that, or are we going to be in the mode of insured getting big pies, and uninsured, well, they can eat cake. Are you part of the solution or the problem. Please provide an alternative solution.

I agree, I feel as if there has been no alternative solution given. Hence the second problem with socialism; it makes people lazy. People become less creative in devising solutions to their problems because, well obviously the government is capable of taking care of all our problems. Haven't you ever read Brave New World or 1984? Do you really want the government to take care of your every necessity so that you can remain naive, but happy? There is a difference between equality for all people, and everyone equally being "taken care of" by their government. It's called communism, which to my knowledge I believe the United States is not. One solution, which I think is very reasonable, is to re-distribute what Americans pay as taxes, not increase them. Currently the United States has spent over $560 billion on the war, which is completely ridiculous. Instead of remaining in this shoddy war and continuing to shell out billions, we need to focus that money internally, towards a stipend to each citizen (or family) to help pay for health insurance. And while this will not be nearly as close to the amount of money needed to completely cover every american, it's a start. Americans are taxed horrendously for a slew of governmental programs that don't work. The last thing we need is another governmental "program" for healthcare. Instead, we should really be cutting back funding on some unnecessary programs in favor of paying for healthcare. The end.