Taxing Medical Care
There are reasons why keeping the government OUT of the healthcare system still makes sense. The Institute of Medicine, a federal advisory committee, is recommending taxing medical care to pay for….um….medical care. Wait…what? I’m confused. The IOM report recommends that the government create a detailed description of a basic set of public-health services that should be made available everywhere (anti-smoking programs, testing for and vaccinating against communicable diseases, injury prevention, screening for chronic diseases such as diabetes, and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, etc). To pay for this there would be a tax on doctor’s visits and prescription drugs. It is always tough to criticize common sense and ethically appropriate goals. I agree with having more preventive health care programs. That being said, we can’t keep going back to the well and taxing the same people over and over again to pay for everything in this country. We have a GREAT healthcare system. We have GREAT doctors in this country. Don’t let anyone hypnotize you into believing otherwise. The problem is that it is UNAFFORDABLE because there are too many third parties who do nothing but collect money from the system. Taxing people more only makes it more unaffordable.
Again, the IOM just proves the government will pay people to smoke crack and write about whatever lunacy occurs to them. Great gig if you can get it, I guess.
Let’s see if I have this right: medical care (e.g. doctor visits, prescriptions, etc.) should be taxed because medical care is too expensive and the government needs more money to make it more “available”…? What’s next…food is too expensive so we need to tax food sales?
It’s really about “wealth redistribution” and not about “good health care” or “good” anything else.
The problem is that we have become a socialist Nanny State. I like Mark Levin’s term, Ameritopia, where politicians and bureaucrats (including many physicians who work in governmental agencies)decide what’s best for society, claiming to be motivated by altruistic visions of fairness and compassion for “the little people.”
Some days you make me crazier. In the first place, we do NOT have a wonderful healthcare system. We do have a majority of competent, ethical, and compassionate h.c. professionals, but the system stinks, as your articles usually demonstrate. It’s disjointed, materialistic, and extravagant. In the second place, health care is not (or shouldn’t be) a private capitalist industry, in my opinion. it’s a public utility based on basic human needs, and ought to be fiananced the same way we finance national defense, forests,water supply, sanitation, and lighthouses. If you think government management would be worse than what we have now, look again.
Sorry. Government just adds more administrators and bureaucracy to everything. It would actually be worse. Americans can’t make the hard call about end-of-life issues and rationing. They want what they want, when they want it, and want it for free. It won’t work for healthcare. Agree to disagree.