Time for a change

To the Editor:

I've worked in healthcare since 1978, in public health, research, clinical, education and industry roles.

Besides personal experience, I've also researched the more than 100 years the AMA has wielded political power, the 80 years of taxpayer subsidized health insurance, 60 years of socialized health, education and welfare, and the almost 50 years of even more directly socialized healthcare in the form of our rapidly swelling Medicare system.

I'm appalled that we think we want more politics in healthcare.

I'm disgusted that we've been led to believe that health insurance is what we want when that is often antithetical to healthcare.

And I'm embarrassed that "We The People," haven't seen a better way to live that's always been right before us.

In every field of science and technology that isn't so political, costs decrease while quality, efficacy and availability increases with every new advance.

Luxuries of yesterday like cell phones and personal computers are now ubiquitous and powerful necessities.

There have been innumerable healthcare advances in the last century that would have made healthcare cheap, effective and easily available to all ... if not for all the politics.

Politicians have made everything related to medicine unfair, complicated, ever changing, severely limited and ghastly expensive.

However, none of the preceding is any part of my main objection to more politics in healthcare.

I'll let others quibble over whether politicians will finally be able to keep a promise, or make something work at all as advertised.

The real problem, whenever we rub that genie's lamp of politics is corruption and calamity.

Everything government does, it does by force. Politics can't do anything without at least the threat of fines, taxes, courts, guns and prisons.

It's easy to dream that this kind of force can be used for good. But the usual reality, as is evident by all of human history, is a scale and degree of injustice and death that only politics can achieve.

Power is, of course, a seduction for those who wield it. But it's just as attractive to those who can simply buy the portion of such power as suits their purposes.

Whenever politics takes a new power, there's a new industry lobbying for the use of that power. We can see how that lobby has worked for the military industrialists and bankers, and we should see what it has done to our health, education and welfare as well.

Adding more power to government, with more snooping into things that are more personal than ever before possible, only makes the resulting corruption more dangerous.

Hitler's infamous "T4" eugenics program under Germany's socialized healthcare system certainly demonstrated one hazard in giving politicians so much power over life.

But think about what we already know of our own government; what it has admitted to from the past (testing plutonium on school children, syphilis experiments on black men, experiments on soldiers), and what they've been forced to admit recently about their spying, militarization and deceit.

Think hard about how much more secretive, powerful and deceitful we know our government to be now than ever before; and just what a government is capable of doing.

And changing the role of healthcare workers from healers to government agents who will give to politicians everything from your DNA to your intimate personal and family details will, over time, change the sort of people who will seek out such a career.

You really shouldn't want that to happen.

"We The People" have exactly and only what we have freely and repetitiously chosen not just every day we sigh, and yield to what we know is wrong and isn't working, but also every Election Day.

Elections were meant to be a means of peaceful revolution. We'd better finally use them for that purpose, because the power over our bodies we're granting to politicians now will have no good end, unless that end is determined by our change of heart and bind.

Liberty of Bust!

Andrew Horning,

Freedom