Contact Your Senator and Congressman Now!

Contact Your Senator and Congressman Now!

Today you and I don’t have a perfect health care system.  Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect health care system.  The closest thing to a perfect system is one that is fully deregulated and operates in a free market.

There is much we could do to dramatically improve the current system in the USA.  Experts have suggested:

1. Punitive Damages.  The USA is the only industrialized nation in the world with punitive damages.  Punitive damages are those awarded to a plaintiff in a malpractice suit that are above and beyond actual, measurable damages.  In other words, they are awarded to punish the defendant.  Punitive damages cause your doctor to spend $250,000 or more per year on malpractice insurance.  You pay for this egregious financial burden through your insurance payment or when you directly pay the doctor.  The cost of medical services you pay could be reduced dramatically if we would eliminate punitive damages.
   
2. Tax Deductibility.  Right now you probably receive health care insurance from your employer and he is allowed to deduct that expense from his taxable income.  However, someone who works for a company that does not provide medical insurance must pay their own medical insurance on an after-tax basis.  In other words, they are not allowed to deduct the cost of their medical insurance from their taxable income.  This is unfair.  Everyone should be able to deduct their health insurance premiums from their taxable income.

I’m confident that there’s more that can be done to deregulate and free up the medical profession to make services better, more innovative, and cost effective, but by taking at least these two steps, we would make vast improvements in our current medical services.

What the Obama Administration is proposing is a path to total socialized medicine.  It doesn’t make any difference what they say; the real goal is now and always has been socialized medicine like that in Europe and in Canada.

What does socialized medicine mean to you?

1. Rationing.  Socialized medicine always means rationing of medical services.  There are no exceptions.  That’s why medical clinics in Seattle and Buffalo are full of people from Canada who can’t get medical care on a timely basis.  People die waiting for medical care in England and Canada.  Is that what you want?
   
2. Comparative Effectiveness Research.  This seemingly harmless term is central to the Obama health care approach, but it means that each patient will not be treated equally.  It means that a younger patient who needs hip replacement will receive priority over someone who is older, regardless of their health.  What it really means is that the government is going to be using statistics to decide which groups of individuals will receive care and which groups won’t.  President Obama even admitted to this when queried by a lady who had an elderly mother with a great “spirit.”  The President said we can’t make decisions on “spirit” but only on hard facts and numbers.  Got it?  If you are older, forget about good, timely health care.
   
3. Technology.  Today there are more MRI machines in Fairfax County, Virginia than there are in the entire nation of Canada.  Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother to Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, and a health policy advisor in the Office of Management and Budget, has criticized Americans for “being enamored with technology.”  Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama advisor, blames medical innovations for two-thirds of the rising cost of medical care.  Both advisors seek to limit future medical innovations.  Is this what you want?  A limitation on medical innovations?
   
4. Advanced Drugs.  For years the drug companies could not work on the creation of drugs to help those with so-called orphan diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy, etc. (there are more than 1,000) because the potential market was so small and because the patent term was so short.  Ronald Reagan extended the patent term for drugs addressing orphan diseases just three years and a miracle happened—all sorts of new drugs came on the market.  I know because my dear wife, Kathi, has had MS for nearly 10 years.  She would most surely be disabled today had it not been for this extension of the patent time by President Reagan.  Sadly, the Obama Administration has already instructed the Federal Drug Administration to not approve any new drug unless it is better than one already on the market.  That one, thoughtless act has already stopped research and development of drugs that could have possibly meant a breakthrough in treating certain orphan diseases.  That order dramatically upped the risk for drug companies.  How can they possibly know in advance if a drug will be better than what is already on the market?  This one new order sentences many hurting and ailing people to continued pain and physical and mental deterioration.  Is this the kind of drug policy you want?
   
5. Financially Destructive.  Socialized medicine not only means waiting months for medical care, no care for those who don’t meet the Comparative Analysis Research criteria, no new innovations, no new drugs, but it also means a crippling financial burden on our nation that could put this country into a permanent economic malaise.
    
6. Where Will You Go?  Today US citizens live long lives thanks to the best medical care in the world.  The US is where people who can’t get treated under socialized medicine in their country come.  But where will you go for medical care after our medical system is destroyed?

If you are scared of government health care that operates as efficiently and courteously as the US Post Office and the IRS, then please contact your US Senators and Representatives today.  Tell them to vote against any further government control over your health care.

Write to your Senator and your US Representative right now.  All you need to contact them is to include their title and name, sent to Washington, DC  20510.
I urge you to act today!