Our Plain and Simple Life

"Health care 'reformers' keep talking about getting us more health insurance. Then they talk about cutting costs. This is contradictory nonsense.

Insurance, whether private or a government Ponzi scheme like Medicare, means third parties pay the bills. When someone else pays, costs always go up. Imagine if you had grocery insurance. You wouldn't care how much food cost. Why shop around? If someone else were paying 80 percent, you'd buy the most expensive cuts of meat. Prices would skyrocket.

That's what health insurance does to medical care. Patients rarely even ask what anything costs. Doctors often don't know. ... Patients rarely ask, 'Is that MRI really necessary? Is there a cheaper place?' We consume without thinking.

By contrast, in areas of medicine where most patients pay their own way, service gets better, while prices fall. ... This shouldn't be a surprise. What holds costs down is patients acting like consumers, looking out for themselves in a competitive market. Providers fight to win business by keeping costs down and quality up.

Yet politicians keep telling us the solution is more insurance. And they mean insurance not just for catastrophic diseases that could bankrupt us but also for routine treatments. The politicians are so oblivious to reality that they are on course to make things worse."

--ABC's "20/20" co-anchor John Stossel

(Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Works that way with everything if you look at it. WalMart undercuts the local shops when they move into townand once they get you there, prices start going up. Makes sense healthcare would work the same way. Doctors don't work for you and your money anymore -- they work for big pharma and the government. What you want, who you want to see for this or that, what treatments you want or refuse don't play into any of it. You're just a tool to get money into someone else's pockets.)