A friend recently e-mailed me to tell me that he believed in health care for everyone but didn’t want it run by the government because our government is so inefficient. This was my response:
Well, I guess my feeling is that the government must be doing something right because here we are, over 225 years later, and we are still a somewhat coherent whole with more services offered to us on a daily basis with some degree of efficiency by our government than most people will know from their government in a lifetime. Our water is clean, our waste is handled, we have roads that connect a country as big as all of Europe and then some. We have police and fire protection and, for the most part, those officers are not on the take and will come to your house to save you whether you have a million dollars or one dollar.
No, it’s not perfect, but it beats hell out of the alternative. The very fact that we can gripe and complain and write to our elected officials without fear of reprisal is a miracle when you consider how often that’s ever happened in history.
So, until people who tell me they believe in health care for everyone but just don’t want the government to run it come up with a better solution that covers everyone, I’m going with a government option.
In a country this blessed, that anyone should die from lack of health care is immoral beyond definition.