Thursday, July 10, 2008

Patient Ownership of Health is the American Way

By Donald R. May

Our nation champions free enterprise and personal freedoms. We have fought wars to end socialist tyranny, and we stand firm against North Korea, Cuba, and other communist dictatorships. How is it that we are on a path to socialized medicine when Canada, Britain, and even Russia and China are seeking free market economic solutions to their socialized health care problems?

Money has always been provided for health care and other necessities of life for the poor and disabled. The poor are used as political human shields to provide cover for the push toward universal government-provided health care. In fully socialized health care systems such as exists in Canada, it is the poor who usually receive the minimal level of health care.

The solutions for health care financing are quite simple. Health care needs to be returned to the basic economic principles that govern the sale of the other necessities of life, including food and housing. Free markets work and bureaucracy and socialism do not.

Personal responsibility is essential to saving health care and to an ownership society. Medical savings accounts for health care and personal investment accounts for Social Security are major reform steps on the road to an ownership society. As most people do not understand economics and fear change, any reasonable solutions will be difficult to implement.

Our elected officials must find the courage to return health care, retirement, and other personal decisions to the people as the people can best make their own decisions. The ownership of health care and retirement funds are essential steps in the return to a free and economically successful society.