Health Care Debate

As the health care debate continues to heat up in Congress, we are beginning to hear the liberal drumbeat for health care rationing crescendo with calls for women to delay diagnostic mammograms until their 50s. Television’s 60 Minutes recently ran a piece on the high cost of dying.

Both of these issues are political nightmares. If a mom delays a mammogram and contracts breast cancer, who will be to blame? Who will comfort the family and the patient? Who will answer the question, “Did I do the right thing?”

The issue of end-time patient care is equally explosive. It is easy to talk in the abstract as Dr.s Byock and Fisher did on the 60 Minute’s show. It’s easy to talk about the money it costs to keep a patient in intensive care. It is an entirely different thing when you are dealing with a parent’s approaching death. I’ve recently experienced that. My mother decided, while she still was able to make informed decisions, to not accept any extraordinary measures to extend her life. She faced the fact that such measures might extend her physical life but not increase or give her any quality of life. When the time came for me to make that decision, it was terribly painful—but easier—because I knew I was doing what my mom wanted and had documented in her living will.

Why then would politicians box themselves into a situation where they can only face blame? Is it control? Is it a desire to save the public’s money? There is probably a little of all of that. Most liberal politicians see health care as a way of leaving a legacy with the country after they have been voted out of office. I’m afraid that the legacy they will leave will be similar to the telephone debacle that government got us into. We had the best telephone system in the world, but government couldn’t leave it alone. They broke it up, gave us inferior service, cost us billions of dollars, and now its coalescing back to what it was years ago. Take Medicare as an example. No checks and balances. Paying for new arms and legs for people who haven’t even been to the doctors. If that’s the way the government will run a new health care program in this country, I say we can’t afford it. Leave it alone!

What decisions are right about health care? I believe it should be between the patient and his doctor. The government has no place at the health care table. If the government does succeed in getting control of the health care system in this country, get ready for declining health in the US.

The Bible says that there is a time to be born and a time to die. I believe there is also a time to do something and a time not to do something. Let’s leave health care to the health care professionals and keep the insurance and government buffoons out of it.