Socialized Health Care

The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided by Congress ever since it was established.  In reality, there is no trust fund.  The money that was supposed to be invested in a trust to fund the retirements of Baby Boomers and others has been spent as soon as it was collected in taxes.  It is currently estimated that Social Security Taxes will fall short of obligations in 2015, just 8 years from now.  Ten years ago already, President Bill Clinton declared that the looming Social Security shortfall was a crisis that needed an immediate solution, yet not a thing has been done to solve the issue in the past decade.  Democrats have stonewalled every attempt to change Social Security to enable it to fund the retirements of future generations of Americans.  Our politicians are simply unwilling to deprive themselves of this huge slush fund that they have used to fund their pet projects.  Incredibly, many of those same politicians now want to give Social Security payments to illegal aliens who have sneaked into this country and worked illegally here.

At this time every Democrat candidate for president is promising a government funded healthcare plan for all Americans.  There are differences in the plans the various candidates are proposing, but the bottom line is that the healthcare of all Americans would come under the control of the federal government.  Unfortunately, many of our fellow citizens are convinced that this means they would be getting free healthcare for the rest of their lives.  A recent poll is reported as showing that 65% of Americans support establishing a universal healthcare plan funded by the government.  Few of the people who support the institution of socialized medicine in America are aware of the ramifications of such a radical change in medical care in America.  

An honest look at socialized medical care (unlike the dishonest look in Michael Moore’s recent movie “Sicko”) reveals that the costs of such care rapidly spin out of control.  Great Britain and Canada found about a decade ago that the costs of their socialized medical care threatened to bankrupt their nations, forcing drastic cuts in care to be made.  Every government controlled and financed medical care plan has found it necessary to ration care in order to keep costs affordable.  Many of the nations with these plans have also made it illegal for their citizens to privately purchase medical care.  Citizens must take the medical care that the government chooses to give to them and nothing else.  The dirty little secret about medical care is that an estimated 66% of medical costs occur in the last 3 months of a person’s life.  This is because at that point most people are suffering from an incurable condition that will take their lives, and no amount of care can save them although heroic measures are often taken to save them.  Most socialized medical care plans force a delay of 3 to 4 months in treatment for diagnosed conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and AIDS in order to control costs.  It is obvious that such a delay will ensure that many, perhaps the majority, of people who have such disorders will die before treatment can start.  This results in huge savings in government health care expenditures.  It is also a major reason why governments with socialized medical care prohibit their citizens from paying for care on their own.  They simply do not want their people to survive this delay and cost them a lot of money later.

An example of how this works from our own country has been provided for us by the state of Washington. In 1993 the citizens of Washington passed a referendum establishing socialized health care in their state.  The plan they adopted was in essence the plan proposed by Hillary Clinton for all of America.  The very next year a referendum was put to the people to legalize euthanasia in Washington state.  This referendum was backed by the administrators of the socialized health care plan because, as one of them stated in backing euthanasia, “Sometimes euthanasia is the most cost effective health care plan.”  Of course it is cheaper, much cheaper, to simply kill a person with cancer or heart disease than to cure the disease or to give them the best treatments available until they die.  That referendum also passed. (A political note for us: the Washington state plan produced a citizens revolt when the people found out what they had really bought into.  This resulted in the election of a Republican legislature that repealed the socialized medical plan just 18 months after it was adopted.)

Now let’s connect the financial dots between Social Security and socialized medicine.  Social Security is obligated to pay out billions of dollars to future retirees from a fund that has already been spent for other things.  Most Baby Boomers can expect to live into their 90’s with today’s health care, and many of them into their 100’s with advances that can reasonably be expected to be made in the next 40 years.  This will force the government to make retirement payments to them for the next 30 to 40 years.  That is longer than many of them paid into Social Security.  There is not enough money to make those payments.  Additionally, 2/3 of the wealth in America is held by people over 65 years of age because they have saved and invested over their whole lifetimes for their retirement.  Socialized medicine will allow the government to limit the medical treatment options available to retirees, ending the lives of many who would otherwise live much longer lives and burden the federal budget with retirement payments and healthcare payments.  This will save billions of dollars for the government that spent the money it was supposed to save for their retirement.  Additionally, reinstitution of the inheritance tax (promised by all Democrats) will allow the government to seize privately held wealth upon the death of its citizens, making the government your heir instead of your children and grandchildren.

The bottom line is this: the longer retirees live, the more it will cost the government in Social Security and healthcare funds, thus a healthy senior is a financial liability for the government that is obligated to take care of him or her.  But the sooner retirees die after they reach retirement age and stop paying income taxes, the sooner the government can take what wealth they have accumulated during their lifetimes through its inheritance taxes.  This produces a powerful financial incentive for the government and its socialized medical care program to ensure that retirees die sooner rather than later.  

This is not just a theoretical problem for our future, it has already produced governments that actively euthanized their retirees in order to save on retirement and healthcare expenditures and to facilitate collection of inheritance taxes.  The lesson is that Americans must be careful what we ask for from our government, because we might just get it, and a lot more than we bargained for along with it.  The citizens of Washington state found that out already.