(continuing discussion of Chuck’s article, “6 Reasons Obama-Care Is Bad Medicine“)

5. Universal health care ultimately would transform legislators into quasi health care practitioners.
Chuck’s point here is brief enough to quote entirely:

With government-sanctioned universal health care, legislators would become quasi medical practitioners because they would lead and guide the government-controlled medical boards, personnel and policies that would oversee the program. That would include abortive and end-of-life counsel and services. Federal politicians would rely upon relatively few chief physicians (appointed mostly by them), who in turn would oversee and implement the medical policies and procedures that they felt were best for the country.

Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, I’m not sure how many different ways there are to say that this is not what we’re talking about.Nobody—let me state that more forcefully—NOBODY is discussing implementation of any kind of universal health care right now. Even the public option, if it completed a nefarious takeover of the whole insurance system, would only be a universal health coverage system (the difference between Canada and the UK, in other words).

This annoys Kevin the fact-finder. It annoys him greatly. Positioning Obamacare as something that it’s not is intellectual dishonesty. It might even be regular dishonesty. As if to hammer the point home, he even alludes to everyone’s favorite nonexistent threat, the death panels. (Now they handle abortion, apparently, too!)

Okay, I’ll tamp down my annoyance for fear of getting a deconstructed face. Regarding his actual allegations, they seem to have no correlation to existing public health-care systems around the world. Confidentiality between a patient and his doctor is universally assured, unless I’m missing something. Chuck’s other suggestions are pure conjecture—the worst possible conjecture—of what a UHC system might look like. Since NOBODY is actually designing such a system at the moment, I can’t really say much more about it.

6. Universal health care would increase big government, and America would continue on the slippery slope toward socialism.
If you wanna make a voter scared of health-care reform, use the phrase “big government.” (For bonus points, add a “socialism.”) The division between liberal and conservative has often been defined as whether you think government does more harm than good. I’m actually a little amused by members of Congress railing about how awful government is—by extension, how awful they themselves are.

But let me lay off the snark. Chuck sez…

Our government already provides two medical coverage programs: Medicare (for senior citizens) and Medicaid (for low-income citizens). The president mentioned in his speech last week that those two programs are the greatest contributors to our skyrocketing deficit. So why not reform, improve and enhance those programs rather than create a third (or fourth or fifth) government medical bureaucracy called “universal health care”?

That’s not what it would be called, Chuck.

Anyhoo, Obama was right about that deficit thing…

Those programs do indeed need to be reformed, improved, and enhanced, with a quickness. Chuck is damn right. But then, all the magic tricks in the world don’t do one tiny measly bit for Americans who are neither old nor poor, and thus eligible for neither program. The question is what to do about the non-old-non-poor folks who are nonetheless in need of some choice health care. That’s a lot of Americans.

Is a new government program the answer? Hey, maybe not! Nobody needs convincing that government programs are, virtually by definition, inefficient and often quite silly. I can’t tell you how sure I am that, if a public option passes, Chuck and company will roll out one insane story after another of the system screwing patients and not working the way it should. This will certainly happen.

Does this mean the whole system will thus be a failure? No. But it’s a point worth taking that it’ll probably be a little bit ugly.