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The Kerry/Edwards Healthcare Solution - By Edward L. Daley
July 21, 2004
John F. Kerry is a lawyer who complains that the healthcare system is
too expensive, yet his running mate, another lawyer, has made his
fortune suing doctors. Malpractice lawsuits, as most people know, are
one of the primary causes of increased medical costs in the U.S., yet
the Kerry/Edwards solution to the problem is NOT to try and prevent
lawyers from bringing frivolous lawsuits against physicians who've done
nothing wrong. Surprise - surprise! Nor is their plan to limit the
amount of damages that plaintiffs with legitimate cases can get... like
say... something approaching a reasonable amount of money.
No, their idea for fixing the problem is to give the federal government
more control over the entire healthcare system. At this point I should
probably explain that roughly 35% of the U.S. Congress is made up of
lawyers and, at least on the left hand side of the aisle, it is heavily
funded by them. Half of the members of the Bush cabinet are lawyers too,
and I suspect that in years past that percentage has been even higher.
The judiciary, of course, is nothing BUT lawyers who've become judges,
so when you think about it, lawyers make up a big part of the government.
When Bill Clinton was in office one could have argued, since he was a
lawyer as well, that the majority of policies created by our government
were devised by lawyers. For all anyone knows, that may still be the
case. After all, even though Bush is not a lawyer himself, there is no
doubt that he depends on the opinions of lawyers whenever he attempts to
present a bill to Congress or formulate a new administrative policy. And
even if that were not true, lawyers would still be an incredibly
powerful force in our government as a whole. If Senator Kerry is elected
president this November, lawyers will exert even more influence over our
everyday lives, and that is something I find to be more than a little
troubling.
Why? Well, look at it this way: in the world outside of politics,
lawyers make up about one third of one percent of America's population.
This is a tiny percentage, especially when compared to the number of
lawyers who are currently holding elective offices in our government,
per capita. Yet, in spite of that fact, the direct costs of civil
litigation in this country run to the tens of billions of dollars every
year. That doesn't even include the indirect costs, which are ten times
higher than that. That's a tremendous amount of green-backs, and who
gets as much as forty percent (and sometimes even more) of all the money
awarded by courts in the U.S., as well as the cash that changes hands
due to out-of-court settlements? Take a wild guess.
Now don't go jumping to any conclusions here. It's not like I'm against
people earning a good living, or even becoming rich. If you're capable
of doing so, more power to you. I'm also not complaining about people
who sue because they've been wronged in some way. If you have been
wronged by someone, you should sue them for just compensation. That's
the American way. I'm simply pointing out that when a group composed of
less than a million people shares a monetary pie worth hundreds of
billions of dollars (that averages out to hundreds of thousands of
dollars per lawyer annually) the odds that a majority of them, or even a
sizable minority, will ever decide to reduce the size of that pie are
negligible.
Which brings me back to the main point of this article. People like the
two Johns, currently running for the highest offices in the land, have
no intention of ever producing policies which might cut into the
cash-flow of their fellow lawyers, or upset all the other politicos who
owe their positions to lawyers. In fact, they want to take control of
the medical profession, because they know that if the government runs
it, lawyers will inevitably decide who gets most of the money produced
by that industry. And no, it won't be the doctors who actually earned
the money.
No lawyer, and indeed, no politician who is backed by lawyers has
anything to gain by allowing the CASH COW that is the medical profession
to remain subject to the normal market forces that rule most other
aspects of the business world, not when they can take control of it.
Furthermore, people like John Edwards will never support any sort of
reforms which might make it more difficult for people to file frivolous
malpractice lawsuits against physicians. Now that lawyers can manipulate
the system to the point at which they are able to detrimentally effect
the costs of patients' medical treatment, they'll keep hammering away
until they convince the majority of people that politicians are the
solution to the problem of skyrocketing medical costs.
They create the problem, and then they waltz in and wave the magic wand
of governmental intervention in our hapless faces, because they
understand that we just want the cost of our healthcare to go down. They
also know that, after a while, we'll fall for even the most amateurish
sleight of hand deception, if it means we get to pay less at the
doctor's office. People will, over time, allow themselves to be
manipulated into accepting just about anything if it means they get to
have what they think they want... you can count on it.
You can also count on a general degradation in quality within the
medical profession if the government takes complete control of it. It's
easy enough to understand why that would be the case if you consider
that competition will no longer be a part of the equation, because
lawyers and politicians will decide which doctor you get to see and what
those doctors will be allowed to do for you. Competition is what makes
people strive to be the best. The best doctors, like the best football
players and the best musicians, are rewarded with more money and
prestige for their exceptional efforts. Take away competition and even
good physicians will work less hard to help you with whatever your
problem is, because their incentive for being the best at what they do
will be gone.
Think about it, would you work any harder than you had to if you knew
you wouldn't be treated any better than the biggest slacker in the place
regardless of what you did? Of course not, and neither will your doctor
if people like John Kerry and John Edwards get their way.
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Edward L. Daley is the owner/operator of the news website The Daley Times-Post.