Socialized Medicine

Did you ever notice how certain issues seem to not have an answer because the people involved are looking for the answers in all the wrong places?  Recently, there was a discussion on the television between a congressman from the state of Vermont and a spokesman for the pharmaceutical companies.  The congressman was a socialist.  (That is not my opinion, this man actually identifies himself as a socialist).  He was decrying the profits being made by the drug industry and the rising costs of medicine in this country.  As the American population of baby boomers begins to reach their later years with an even slightly increased life-span, the rising costs of drugs has become a significant problem.  Government programs like Medicare cannot seem to pick up the slack.  People on fixed and low incomes, those who are least able to afford it often seem to be the ones who need drugs the most.  The representative from Vermont was calling for price controls and more governmental control over the pharmaceutical industry.  In true socialistic fashion, he was extolling the virtues of socialized medicine in Canada where the government actually subsidizes the cost of medications.  He even went so far as to suggest that the state of Vermont buy drugs in Canada for resale in the state because they can be purchased cheaper than in the US.  The fact is that socialized medicine has been a failure wherever it has been tried, including Canada, and the last thing Canada needs is to help subsidize the pharmaceutical needs of the people of Vermont.  The idea is ludicrous.

Unfortunately, as bad as his argument was, the spokesman for the capitalist side, the drug industry, was not presenting a good argument.  His solution was that people should buy private insurance to cover the cost of medications.  That is an easy answer for a guy who makes a six-figure income but a good percentage of the working public cannot afford any insurance. And if the working public cannot afford insurance, how can he expect people who are on fixed income to buy additional insurance to cover medications? With stupid arguments like that, it is no wonder this country is accepting socialism on a wholesale level.  If we are made to believe that a minimum wage is a right, education is a right, a certain income is a right and it is the job of government to insure these rights, then it is easy to argue that living is also a right and we are entitled to have someone pay for our medications.  (The assumption being you cannot live without drugs which may or may not be correct for certain people).

            They say that there is no right answer to a wrong question.  Similarly there is no right answer to a wrong situation.  The congressman assumes people are going to need more and more drugs to be healthy and are going to be priced out of it by profit-conscious drug companies.  The drug companies assume that the economy will grow and people will be able to afford the drugs or to buy insurance which will spread out the cost of the drugs among the population.  Perhaps the solution is to look elsewhere for the answer to people’s health problems.  Drugs have not made the people of this country any healthier, just better able to live with their lack of health.  Maybe we need to begin to do the things necessary to keep ourselves healthier.  Why is it that a husband and wife can live together for 60 years and he spends four or five hundred dollars a month on medication and she needs none.  Let us look to what makes people healthy and more important, what keeps people healthy.  The answer is not in a pill.  The idea that there is a single, one-shot answer like a miracle drug is what has gotten us into this mess.  It sure is not going to get us out whether socialized medicine pays the bills for it or we pay for it ourselves.

The answer is in doing those things, all the things necessary to make us healthier.  Things like eating better, exercising more, and yes, getting checked and adjusted when necessary by a chiropractor on a regular lifetime basis.  We also need to stop doing the things that keep us from being healthy.  There is a great deal of work to be done in the area of health and it is never going to be done unless we start looking for the answer in the right places.