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March 24, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:32
1622 True News: Feedback on How to Talk to People About Obama's Health Care Bill

Some great feedback from FDR1621...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is the 24th of March 2010.
I got some responses to the video yesterday that I did on the infliction of Obamacare on the American public, and so I would like to respond to the comments and questions that I got, which were all very smart, of course. Somebody sent me an article by Theodore Dadimple.
It's a pseudonym for a former prison psychiatrist who is now retired.
The fix is in, is the article, which is of great interest and relevance to the U.S. healthcare debate.
Why Britain's National Health Service spends so much and does so little.
It's from 22nd March 2010.
I won't read the whole thing to you, but there's some very interesting things here.
He writes, Americans would do well to ponder A recent admission by a former British minister in the Blair government.
On March 2, The Guardian, It reported that the ex-minister, now Lord Warner, said that while spending on Britain's national health service had increased by 60% under the Labour government, its output had decreased by 4%.
That, I think, is very interesting.
While the service has taken on 400,000 new staff members, that is to say one-fifth of all new jobs created in Britain during the period, Continuity of medical care has all but extinguished.
Nobody now expects to see the same doctor on successive occasions in the hospital or anywhere else.
And I'll put a link to the article.
But the money, the ex-minister says that the money had been simply wasted, but that's not true.
That's just actually not true.
As it happens, the National Health Service knew exactly what to do with the money, gave it to its staff, new and old.
British doctors are now the second highest paid in the world, though not necessarily the happiest.
They have accepted the money on condition that they also accept, as quietly as mice, increasing government interference in their work.
When you go to see a family doctor in Britain, he is most likely, To do what the government thinks he ought to do and will pay him a bonus for doing than what he thinks is right.
That's pretty sinister.
Now, the writer says there's another possible explanation other than managerial inexperience, they say, for the waste, namely the waste that the waste was intended and desired.
Indeed, that was the principal object of the spending.
Experience has long shown.
That further spending by state monopoly suppliers of services, if services is quite the right word, it benefits not the consumers but the providers.
And they, ever more numerous, naturally vote for their own providers, the politicians.
Thus the NHS has become an enormously expensive method of ballot stuffing.
Personally, I would rather have outright electoral fraud, he writes, it would be less expensive and slightly more honest, and, of course, better for The patients.
Just before the last election, the chief executive of one of the hospitals in which I once worked was overheard saying, quote, my job is to make sure that the government is re-elected.
The government's job in turn was to make sure that she remained chief executive.
She also explained that the hospital could expect no increase in its government funding, unlike other hospitals, because it was located in an area in which most people voted for the current government.
Anyway, I think that's really important.
You know, just because you move something into the government doesn't mean that you're transferring it to an entirely different set of humanity who have no interest in furthering their own careers, their own power, their own money, their own prestige.
You just politicize what used to be something in the free market.
You turn it into politics.
And politics, as Harry Brown said, is the art of punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends and doing whatever you need to do to stay in power.
And that's what happens to your health care.
It doesn't get floated into some platonic abstraction of altruistic and selfless concern for your health and interests.
It gets moved into the sphere of those who use political power to maintain their own prestige and incomes.
There's just the same human beings, the same human beings in the government who are running healthcare.
It's the same human beings who start wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You understand, right?
Obama, who is dewy-eyed and dripping with all that kind of caressing magic of his velvet voice, is the same guy who is not prosecuting former members of the Bush administration for torture.
And who has, despite his promise to make the government more transparent, has increased secrecy within his government considerably.
This is the same guy who doesn't close down military bases.
This is the same guy who pours tens of thousands more troops into harm's way to prosecute unjust, illegal, immoral, genocidal wars, right?
The same warmonger is the same guy who's really going to care how healthy you are.
He doesn't care about the health of the troops.
He sure as hell doesn't care about the health of the Afghanis or the Iraqis who are dying by the hundreds of thousands.
Right? If he doesn't care about their health, what makes you think that this guy is all duly-eyed and caring about your health?
It's the same people.
It's the same structure.
It's the same entity.
You can't...
You can't logically divvy up the government into this side be evil, this side be good.
It's the same structure and institution.
If you oppose the US having military bases in 170 countries around the world and prosecuting wars and extraordinary renditions and tortures, then it's the same government that you're giving over your health care to.
It's the same entity.
You can't rationally split it into these schizophrenic good-bad government entities.
It's the same thing. And the fact that more government spending results in lower efficiency is a principle as old as government.
Just look at the American healthcare system and just do a search.
Correlate The spending per student with student scores.
More spending usually results in lower scores.
And if you've ever worked in the government, you don't need to know why.
I have. Okay, so this is a criticism that I got.
Thank you so much for writing. This is a writer who writes, and I won't give out any details.
He says, my wife and I listen to you at least a couple of times a week.
I hope during your passionate lovemaking.
We both believe you are one of the brightest people on the planet.
Well, thank you. That being said, after listening to your explanation about how to talk to people about healthcare, I feel I must explain to you how wrong you are about how the healthcare system works in the US. My wife, I'm not going to give any details about them, but suffice to say they know what they're talking about in a way that I could never ever know what I'm talking about with regards to healthcare.
So I hope that you will trust me when I say they have far more expertise than I will ever have.
So this is an insider explanation.
He said, you said the doctors must charge more because of their expenses incurred for school and residency, but the fact is that physicians do not decide what a certain procedure is worth and charge their patient that amount.
The insurance companies dictate with no negotiation what they will pay for every procedure.
The doctor can accept these reimbursements and sign a contract with the insurance company, or not accept it and not see any of the company's policyholders.
There are clauses in the contracts that are tricks to make health insurance look attractive by mandating higher prices for cash-paying patients without insurance.
I can go into exactly how this is done.
If you're interested, just let me know.
We would be thrilled to death if the regulation were lifted, allowing nurses and assistants to do more, as I believe every physician would.
It would mean more money for us, not less.
By the way, this is the first thing that I have ever disagreed with you on, and I've been a fan for about five years.
So don't take this one little mistake to heart, as I know you will not.
Peace. Thanks.
That's a great, great letter. And it's an excellent, excellent correction.
It's not a fundamental correction of what I was saying.
I hope at least it's not.
And of course, if it is, just let me know.
Let me read to you another communication that I got.
He says, this is a fellow who says, I'm close to entering my fourth and final year of medical school, and at the end of this year, I will be about $230,000 in debt and 27 years old.
And he says, I was always told not to worry about the cost because everyone gets by.
I do feel I was sort of naive and being manipulated, I think, had I approached the decision to become a doctor.
With a little bit more of a mature understanding of the reality of how healthcare really works, I may not have made the decision that I ended up making.
That having been said, now I'm at this point, I still think I should take advantage of what this schooling offers me.
And he goes on, and I just wanted to mention to those who have written to me and said that they are concerned about the statist intervention and control of healthcare everywhere in the world.
I mean, look, I'm no doctor, I'm just a guy with a camera and entirely too many thoughts for his own good.
But I will say this, if you love being a healer, if you love caring for people, if you love making sick people better, if you have a passion for that, please, please, please don't let the bad guys win, right?
Don't let the existence of A system that you had nothing to do with creating.
We're not around. We're not consulted.
It's a system that is in place.
You can't stop it as an individual.
Don't let that system take away the happiness and joy that you have in your chosen profession of being a doctor.
There will be bureaucratic irritants and so on, but the reality is Don't let a bad system take away your joys and what it is you want to do in the world.
That really is surrendering a glowing and beautiful treasure of your own happiness to something which bad people, or at least misguided people, have created and which you can't control.
So that's my suggestion as far as that goes.
Now, the fellow's entirely right, and his wife, who wrote to me to say that I was talking out of my armpit when it came to saying that doctors set prices.
I don't think that I meant that.
I mean, if I'm sure that I didn't mean that, what I did mean was that doctors will set their own salaries, at least to some degree.
This guy, who is now almost a quarter million dollars in debt, and he still has to go through a couple of years of residency where he's going to make, what, 40 or 50k a year and work like A Neapolitan slave under the Romans.
He's going to end up ridiculously in debt and he's not going to start making any real coin until he's in his mid to late 30s and possibly even his 40s, depending on how he takes it.
That amount of debt where you have basically bought a house before you've even bought a house, you simply have to charge more to pay off that debt.
Now, the insurance companies will, of course, set the prices for a lot of these things.
I'm not going to argue with that.
You know a heck of a lot more about it than I do.
But the reality is that the wages of the doctors are a significant portion of healthcare costs.
I'm not saying it's the be-all and end-all.
Of course, it's many factors.
The fact that doctors have to pay so much to become doctors and end up so much in debt is one reason why they have to charge so much to practice and those costs get passed along to the customers as part of the price of a healthcare procedure.
So I just wanted to mention that. Thank you, though, for the clarification.
That's really, really important.
And please, if you hear stuff that is wrong or misguided or, you know, idiotic or at least unclear, please, please let me know.
I really, really want to focus on keeping the integrity of the show And the honesty of the show so that you can at least trust to some degree what it is that I'm saying.
The important thing is to check everything out that you find is problematic and even things you don't find are problematic.
So please, please keep these corrections coming.
That's very, very important to me and to the listeners.
So, the last thing that I've sort of mentioned is that there is a provision in the healthcare bill to tax, tax the rich, tax the rich, right?
That's the solution to every problem.
So, they're taxing people who make more than $200,000 to pay for healthcare.
I wonder what the average salary of doctors is in the US. Gosh, I wonder if it's around that or more.
Well, if you tax doctors to pay for healthcare, all the doctors are going to do is increase their costs.
Like, since their costs have gone up, they're just going to increase What do they charge patients and what they charge insurance companies and so you're really not going to save that much in healthcare.
You know there's this wild fantasy that someone else is going to pay and to some degree it's true in that the poor pay through inflation or the future unborn generations pay through deficits and debts but in the economic world of the here and now There is no free lunch,
right? If you say, well, we're going to soak the rich and we're going to up the rich's income taxes by 10%, okay, so all that happens is the salaries of the rich go up and you, as the end consumer, end up paying for that.
I mean, you throw that boomerang.
You think you're throwing a dagger to get blood from someone else.
It just comes back to you.
That's again something that I think is important to understand when it comes to healthcare.
So I hope this has been useful and helpful and thank you so much for watching and listening and supporting the show.
You can check out more at freedomainradio.com It's not the end of the world.
This is a system that is going through its convulsions.
There's always this monster in movies.
It's this towering beast and there are these arrows and lasers and cannons and whatever is hitting it.
And at some point it sort of pauses and it shakes its head slowly and it goes...
And it falls down.
And the existing system, the status system, is dead and gone.
It hasn't fallen over yet, but it's...
You know, it's doing that Terminator thing at the end of Terminator 2, where he's going through every conceivable permutation in order to try and escape the molten lava of his own ending.
Well, this is the case with the state at the moment.
The state is long dead and gone.
It is so heavily in debt.
It is so much over-leveraged.
There's simply no way...
to keep it running, to keep it going.
And so what's happening at the moment Is that it's like a treasure room.
You know, you're Indiana Jones, right?
You come in to the treasure room and there's all these gold goblets and coins and jewels and all of these rubies and diamonds and sapphires and so on.
And what happens is you trip some sort of trap and you know that big, I could probably imitate it quite well, that big stone bowling ball at the beginning of the first Indiana Jones is coming rolling down.
And what's happening is you just have to grab whatever you can and dive out.
Of the treasure room before the door comes down, before the poison gas is released, before the roof comes caving in.
You know, at the end of every sword and sorcery movie, they have to run out of the wizard's palace as it all comes collapsing down.
And maybe they'll grab a few things along the way.
But that's the reality of where the state is at the moment.
I mean, it's... it's dying, it's falling over, and people are just grabbing whatever they can.
This isn't... I mean, it's so clearly not sustainable.
This entire system. It's completely unsustainable.
And so what's happening is people are just, what do I need to say to pillage the last few pieces of gold from the state treasury before the whole system collapses?
What lies do I need to spread?
What incentives do I need to offer?
Who do I need to bribe? Who do I need to terrify?
Who do I need to get on board?
They're just throwing every piece of linguistic trick around on the planet To grab the remaining goal before the system comes down.
So, you know, have a heart. We are close to a change in the way that people look at things.
And with any luck with your work and with my work, people will get that the problem is the coercion at the heart of the state.
And that we can look forward to a happier and more positive and benevolent and peaceful and wonderful world.
And we will finally have an answer to the question.
The most fundamental question around healthcare or any government program is, you say, well, the poor, they can't afford healthcare.
They need to get healthcare. It's like, absolutely they do.
Absolutely they do. So what's going to happen when the system runs out of money?
What's going to happen when you can't borrow?
What's going to happen to the poor?
When the unsustainability of the system becomes manifest and it totters, because that beast, that beast that towers above us, that is groaning and rippling and beginning to fall, that beast always falls on the poor.
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