Originally Posted by
honedright
I just wanted to comment on these two statements of yours.
I agree with you that health care should be affordable. I think the disagreement is the method to achieve that goal. You seem to think the government is a savior. In this case I think it is an impediment.
The part of your statement that stood out to me was the "keeping me healthy" part. You do, of course, realize that only you have control over keeping you healthy? And that is limited greatly by your genetics? I'm not necessarily saying this about you, but there seems to be a huge misconception (or is it blind faith?) about traditional medical practice, that they are somehow omnipotent. Not saying that the medical profession doesn't help. Medicine is mostly, if not entirely, reactive to illness, as opposed to proactive. Medicine, in general, doesn't do much until after illness occurs. Prevention is mostly, if not entirely, an individual responsibility. So keeping you healthy is really your job. And after you become sick, it is really a crap shoot as to whether medical treatment will restore you to some level of health. It may be a total restoration, or a partial one. And in some cases, no restoration at all. Ask any Doctor a prognosis and it will be given in percentages (you know, the old 50-50 chance of recovery bit?), and without any guarantees. It's because none of them really knows what will happen. There is an old saying that: "God does the healing, the Doctor collects the bill." Meaning that the outcome of medical treatment is really an unknown, except for the payment part.
The other statement I basically addressed in my second paragraph. I think government is an impediment - when and where it doesn't belong. I don't believe that government, in and of itself, is slimy and shady. Certainly there are administrations that fit the slimy catagory. I happen to believe that the current one fits this. But government certainly has an important and essential role. And I personally want government to perform it's role. In fact I gladly pay government to do it's job. It's when government steps beyond it's role (and history shows that when governments do this they generally fail miserably), and especially the role defined by state ratified founding documents, that I, and many conservative minded persons, have a disagreement.
