Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P. J. O'Rourke

Author:P. J. O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: United States, History, General
ISBN: 9781848879423
Publisher: Atlantic Books, Limited
Published: 2010-11-01T12:19:55+00:00

I couldn’t have gotten into a medical school. I couldn’t have gotten into a veterinary school for goldfish. (“Flush twice and call me in the morning.”) At the college where I went all they taught about health care was how to nurse a hangover. But I do know something about going to hospitals and about other people who go to hospitals and about the percentage of us people who go to hospitals needing medical treatment who get it, which, in America, would be 100.

If you’re sick or injured and you come to an emergency room, they have to take you in. It’s the law. That this doesn’t cost “health care providers” a fortune is not a law. Much of what happens in the American health care industry would—in any other business—be called shoplifting. Even in utopian Massachusetts, where the number of people without health insurance dropped by 74 percent, the number of people who received un-reimbursed care from the state’s hospitals dropped by only 36 percent.43

I also know something about politics. The Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, passed by the House of Representatives on November 7, 2009, was 1,990 pages long. You could stand on it to paint the ceiling. The entire U.S. Constitution can be printed on eight pages. That’s eight pages to run a whole country for 221 years versus four reams of government pig latin if you slam your thumb in a car door.

No congressman had read this bill (even assuming they all can read). And the busy president of the United States could hardly have had time to do so. Not that this matters. Health care reform is the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue of politics. Beautiful, enticing, generously endowed legislation like this is not for reading. How it looks is what matters. From the neck up it can be as empty as you like.

There’s only one thing about a government proposal of this complexity that we can be sure of: it won’t work. No government proposal more complex than “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private” ever works, and that one hasn’t been working lately.

Also, doesn’t anybody in Congress remember that Hillary Clinton has already been there with health care reform, seventeen years ago? A lot of people say that Hillary’s health care reform plan almost destroyed Bill Clinton’s first term. It certainly diminished Hillary’s influence in the White House. Bill had to seek help from a different woman to almost destroy his second term.

There’s a simpler way to make health care cheaper. Just make it worse. And politics can do that. Government-controlled health care will drive the best people out of the business. Who wants to spend all those years studying to be a doctor just to end up as a petty bureaucrat?

Someday we’ll be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation and the surgeon will be the same person who’s now behind the counter when we renew our registration at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

If we’re not careful we’ll

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