Doctors ARE businessmen. If they don’t make a profit, they can’t maintain their practice and they’ll either have to go to work for someone else, or choose another profession where they CAN make a profit.

All socialized medicine will get you is the same crappy care & run-down facilities that you find at VA hospitals.

The reason why they’re terrible is that you don’t have a comprehensive system of nationalised healthcare. So what happens is that the HMOs shove the expensive cases off onto the state while continuing to collect premiums from healthy people in return for doing nothing. This is what people mean when they say “nationalising the costs and privatising the profits.” This isn’t lefty hyperbole, it’s an accurate assessment of what actually happens.

So how does it happen? Many different ways, but one egregious example is in the case of leukaemia patients. Supposedly what happens is that when you are diagnosed with leukaemia your employer’s HMO will slap a 1 million dollar increase on their premiums, and make it clear that the increase will go away as soon as you do. Your employer can’t fire you for getting sick, of course, but they can always find a reason eventually, and they have a million reasons to find one.

So once you’re out of a job and uninsurable your only choice is to spend your savings paying for healthcare up-front until you’re sufficiently destitute to qualify for medicaid. Then the government has to pay for your care, while the HMOs continue to profit by only providing their service to people who don’t really need it.

If you look at the budget for medicare and medicaid and compare them to the cost of the British NHS, you’ll find that the NHS costs slightly less per 1000 people. This is one of the reasons why. Nationalised medicine means that decisions about care are made by doctors and not by businessmen, which is how it should be.

What you need to understand is that you already have a ‘socialised’ system. That is, you share liability with a bunch of other people; if one of them gets sick, your premiums go up. The house always wins. What you have is a socialised system that has no duty of care, which can simply weasel out of covering people who might be a burden. That means that your premiums may stay down, but your taxes will go up – and you’ll still be paying the premiums as well.

You could try to keep the taxes down by abolishing medicare and medicaid and simply letting the uninsured die, but even people with good insurance can find themselves uninsured very easily. If you aren’t a millionaire then that option is not only selfish, it’s tantamount to playing Russian roulette.

I don’t care how right-wing you are, a system that works is a system that works, and a system that doesn’t is a system that doesn’t. Support healthcare reform.

Goe, has a free-market friendly solution to oil dependency that doesn’t involve more drilling.

WOW.

Hehehe. Is ok to borrow that expression, Goe? Or am I just being dumb to ask?

and the republican problem stems from several things

1) letting the democrats and lefty press define ‘moderate’ positions and republican positions to the benefit of leftists

2) abandoning fiscal conservatism (and libertarian/free market republicans)

3) giving up on federalism

4) republicans in leadership positions assuming that because democrats get away with crap, that crap is okay and they should do it too.

Goe, will fight evil for food and/or a hug.

NOW: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Mitt Romney, etc.

Wow, how far the Republican party leadership has fallen.

Wouldn’t hurt to send it to Hot Air, Instapundit, Pajamas, Red State, Ace of Spades and Fox News, too.

Also helpful (although more work than I have a right to even suggest that anyone do) is creating a written transcript of this for people on dial-up and the otherwise audio/video impaired.

Ditto what Nylecoj said.