A line in the sand

I really don't like socialized medicine. Here in Italy everyone
has health care, but the health care is of the level of the public
health hospital in New Orleans that we went to when the Navy
closed down the hebert medical center in the 1970's. Crappy.

The worst part of nationalized health care here is the need to
prove that you are a legal resident requires a mountain of paperwork
and bureaucracy before one can get a health card. Visa, permisso de
soggiorno, that should be enough to get us health care cards, but no,
we also needed residency here in Ravenna, plus a crapload more forms.

After all that we now have health cards that entitle us to crappy health
care. I don't want this system in the US, and I'll allow a lot of stuff
out of the current administration without complaint, there's a crises, yada
yada, but nationalized health care is where I draw the line.

As Rush Limbaugh recently said on his show:

I think the only thing that's going to turn people around will be time, and that will require the failure of Obama policies to work. That will happen, and I think 2010, 2012 will both provide pretty good opportunities for significant Republican gains in the House and Senate, maybe even the White House back, but limiting the damage between now and then so that even after Republicans win in 2010 or 2012, that there's still something left to fix, that's not so far gone.

Like if they get national health care, I mean that's a tipping point. We may have had it in terms of the structure of the country being a republic and founded on the notion of individual liberty, democracy, and all that.

You can give out trillions in wellfare in the form of tax rebates to those that don't pay taxes, give even bigger piles
of cash to failed banks, but if the health care system is nationalized, it will also require a similar
bureaucratization of every aspect of american life. Freedom of speech, Freedom of religion and
freedom of the overlordship of petty bureacrats are the best things about america and we shouldn't give
them up without a fight.

[my idea for the healthcare system would be for the federal government to pay for
catastrophic health insurance after requiring that everyone that can afford it should
buy it, even those that are perfectly healthy. The problem is that people confuse health
insurance with health care. Insurance works great when it's millions of people insured
and only thousands of people that need coverage every year and for catastrophic health
care, that's how it works if everyone is in the pool. To insure people for day to day visits
to the doctor it works poorly.

Maybe medical savings accounts for people with decent incomes plus medicaid for
everone else would be the answer for the normal doctor visits.]