Conservative Case for Socialized Medicine in America

Conservative Case for Socialized Medicine in America

By Alex Lubarsky

When my son was about eight, he and some of his friends decided to have a little fun by sliding down the roof of our house, luckily the crew of daredevils did not get hurt. When my wife found out about it from a neighbor, she promptly punished the boy for a month, essentially taking away his freedom and what little independence he had once enjoyed.

Similarly, when we behave in a self-destructive manner, someone, in this case our government, will want to step in to save us from ourselves. Do you think healthcare would be on the minds of our politicians if the country was mostly well? They are not, for example, looking to take over fine watch manufacturers, because all of our watches work without skipping a beat, so no one gives it any thought. Our health as a nation, on the other hand, is in emergency care. It’s a highway catastrophe, with the patient sprawled on the ground, bleeding and gasping for air. So emergency crews are rushing to the scene to try and rescue the victim. Obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease are a rampant; it is a modern version of the Black Plague, infecting the adult population as it slithers towards the youngest among us. In fact, the fastest growing contingent of obese people in the United States is made up of six-month-old babies.

Now that we have this unprecedented demand on our system of care, everyone who is not well, and that is most of our population, demands to have unlimited access to a personal entourage of highly trained medical professionals, and…they think someone else should be paying for it.

Before I go any further, let me just say that I hate socialized anything. I think anyone who can entertain these ideas has not lived under that kind of soul-stealing, everything-for-everyone-yet-nothing-for-anyone system and perhaps has to experience it firsthand before the reality of its dangers slowly begins to unveil. So, in that regard, maybe socialized medicine in the United States is just the toxic medicine that the doctor ordered.

The other point I would like to make, as I lay out my case for the government’s takeover of our healthcare system, is that the loss of freedom is usually in direct correlation with apathy. When we stop caring about something, we create a vacuum for some opportunistic entity to take over. If we stop caring about our garden, for example, weeds will take over the garden. If we stop caring about our freedom, there are plenty of sinister groups ready to subjugate us and take away everything we hold dear. And if we stop caring about our health, the government will look to impose something like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

So if we, as a nation, have neglected our well-being for so long that the situation has become dangerous to the future of our survival, maybe we no longer deserve to be in charge of our own healthcare. Maybe the government will do a better job taking care of you then you. Clearly, they can’t do any worse.

I hope you are at least a little angry, for having me suggest that you, an American citizen, a smart, independent thinker, and one responsible for building the most advanced and prosperous country in the history of mankind, is not capable of making decisions about your own life, and that you would be better off with Big Brother looking after you. Perhaps now we can examine this situation from something of a different perspective. If, let’s say, you don’t care about your health, and if on a daily basis you do a hundred things to undermine it, yet nothing to improve it, then you don’t deserve to live in freedom. Even if this government attempt to take over healthcare fails, which it will, it does not leave us any better off. We are all so sick that we can’t afford to maintain our self- imposed lifestyle diseases indefinitely as this current system of care is designed to do.

In my mind, the answer is twofold. First and foremost, we must take responsibility for our own health and well-being; we must understand its value in relation to our life and everything we consider important. We must begin educating ourselves on the fundamentals of a lifestyle that fosters vibrant health, and we must reverse this dangerous trajectory of homicide via self-inflicted wounds, if not for ourselves then for the future generation, for our children.

Second, we must shift the teeter-totter of the current model of care from a focus on disease to that of prevention and wellness. Today we’re spending almost 3 trillion dollars per year handing out band-aids at the proverbial highway pile up, one that is still going on, growing and picking up momentum, with a new crop of victims every day that will need attention and more emergency care from our government. So really, our politicians are simply trying to do what they have been asked, indirectly, by the people they serve. We asked them to protect us, to save us in an emergency, and this ‘Three Stooges Tango’ is their laughable attempt.

The future of this nation is threatened by the trajectory of the health of its citizens, and we are looking to the wrong institutions to save us. The fire department is awesome when there is a fire, but virtually useless if you keep setting yourself on fire. Government is wonderful, especially the one in the United States, for the purposes it was designed, but clumsy and almost comical when you ask it, through your actions, to run your life.

Make no mistake, the situation is dire, but the answer to our national health problems, and the fate of our freedom as individuals to make decisions about our life, is dependent on whether or not we choose to get off the roof and start living like responsible adults.

Alex Lubarsky is the founder of Health Media Group, Inc., host of the weekly Health Media LIVE radio program, and one of the organizers of the NAVEL Expo. He was born in Moscow, Russia, during the reign of the former USSR. His passion is to inspire personal responsibility and the freedom that it fosters.