Broken Health Care Hurts Rural Hospitals
To the editor:
Fayette County officials proffered a taxing hospital district because MediCare had broken health care’s fiscal viability in most rural settings. A majority of FC voters rejected that proffer because they were unwilling to supplement MediCare with tax dollars just because of where they lived. It just wasn’t fair.
Government run health care produces unbelievable wealth for drug companies and urban hospitals, while suffering doctors and nurses to question the wisdom of a career where caring is squeezed ever more thinly into a bureaucratic commodity. I call it assembly line medicine where the economic motive is to maximize third party billing while trimming the cost of treatment with “system efficiencies” for patients who have little say in the matter. Health care professionals don’t like it. Patients don’t like it. And the money trail continues rising to Big Hospitals, Big Pharma and their government agency brethren, while the power over us that government run health care allows pleases the political class, limits patient choices and bullies doctors into using only authorized treatments by refusing to pay for most experimental treatments.
Not only is MediCare destroying rural health care markets, it has neutered the bottom up creative moxy that once defined a class of medical care unmatched anywhere in the world. We need to understand why bottom up health care where doctors are in control of all aspects of treatment is better than treatment effected by what government will pay. By losing the ability to choose services in an open and free market patients have become pawns to a huge healthcare bureaucracy that respects most the source of their revenues, leaving patient treatment outside the context of that financial motivation. They may be motivated ethically, but it’s not the same as needing to please a patient who has a choice of who provides treatment.
The plain and simple reality is that the politics of wealth redistribution that robs us of choice is — in this long and complex history of government meddling in health care — why Fayette County no longer has a hospital.
Don Carpenter Schulenburg