The Low-Carb Curmudgeon

This is a bit off-topic but since my fellow LC blogger feels the need to get on his soapbox about it, I’ll put my own two cents in, especially in case he doesn’t un-moderate my comment. (He doesn’t mind dissent, so he probably will un-moderate it, but just the same.)

Here’s his post. Here’s my answer:

I agree that government intrusion into personal information is bad. However, government paying for health care doesn’t necessitate the government intrusion into personal information, at least not to the degree we are seeing now.

Medicare is socialized medicine, yet somehow the elderly and disabled (certain disabilities qualify for the program) have managed to live their lives without being rounded up and forcibly put on diet pills for the last 50 years. And there are a lot of fat old people.

The military health care system is socialized medicine, yet somehow the only beneficiaries of it who are picked on about their weight are the ones serving as active-duty military–which, you may be surprised to learn, are only a fraction of MHCS beneficiaries. The rest are family members of active duty, military retirees, and family members of military retirees, none of which are required to maintain any specific BMI. And the active-duty folks are only picked on about their BMI because military readiness is at issue.

By the way, the military health care system costs about one-fifth of the DOD budget as of 2007, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation. (I looked. Google is amazing, innit?) That’s kind of a high number, but considering who all it covers and the range of medical problems they have, and how much DOD likes to spend on seemingly inexpensive items like hammers and toilet seats, it’s still pretty amazing. I wasn’t clear on whether the number included CHAMPUS/TriCare, but I would guess it does.

There is a lot that’s wrong with the health care reform bill (I almost spelled that “bull”) recently signed into law. But making everyone pay into health insurance isn’t part of what’s wrong. I used to think it was. Then I had it pointed out to me that the health insurance system is not viable if only sick people are paying for it. It’s something to do with an imbalance between seller advantage and buyer advantage, the same issue that makes the used-car industry such a tough moneymaker for car sellers. Only in the case of used cars, the seller is the one with the advantage, while with health insurance the buyer has the advantage. Used-car prices are stagnant because there’s only so much a buyer will pay while knowing less than the seller about the product. Health insurance companies stand to go out of business with only the buyer knowing about his or her health status. It’s amazing it hasn’t happened already.

Basically the bill’s there to keep health insurance companies viable. That’s pretty bad too, but nobody wanted actual socialized medicine, so this was the compromise they came up with. If people would stop knee-jerking about Communism every time the subject of single-payer medicine comes up, we wouldn’t have been saddled with this huge boondoggle. Going single-payer would have slashed administrative costs like you wouldn’t believe, and we’d be looking at that one-fifth number rather than the monstrosity this will someday become since the health insurance companies never saw a profit they didn’t like.

By the way there’s nothing in the Constitution that says we have to have a standing army either. It only says, paraphrased, that the federal government’s in charge of national defense. If we’re going to be precious about Constitutional details then let’s dismantle every base we have on foreign soil and bring all the troops home unless this nation is actually under attack from another distinct nation’s official military, which was the purpose of the United States military to begin with.

Of course, I view health care as national defense, since sickness kills more of us than war does. And at least half the time, this nation asks for it when we wind up at war anyway. So if it’s OK to go bomb someone when we provoked them to begin with, it has to be OK for everybody to foot the bill when someone gets fat on purpose. Assuming, um, that people do get fat on purpose. Bet you know the answer to that one.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the government sticking its nose into our business. I still object to that. But I don’t think it’s a necessary aspect of paying for a service. I, a taxpayer, pay for rangers to oversee my national parks, but that doesn’t mean I pay attention to how much my local rangers fudge their time sheets. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

People. Do you pay for your own military, your own police force, your own firefighters, and your own Interstate highway system? No, you do not. You do not foot the entire bill. Each of you does not foot the entire bill. Instead, each of you is only responsible for a fraction of it.

You don’t mind paying for those things. Why do you mind paying for health care?

Don’t tell me “it’s unconstitutional.” Where is Interstate 55 found in the Constitution? Or a standing army, even?

There’s this great myth that health care would be cheaper if we’d never had insurance to begin with. Bullshit. Insurance was begun precisely because middle-class people had trouble paying for a doctor. Never mind what the poor were going through. But of course, if you earn less than $75k a year, you don’t really count anyway.

I meant to ask my doctor yesterday, when I went in for my first checkup in five years, for a price sheet just out of curiosity of what it would cost to pay cash. I’m due for a girly-bits checkup in the next several weeks, and I will try to remember when I go back in, and then share with all of you.

But even if a doctor visit is only a hundred bucks, if you happen to be earning $800 a month, that is a HUGE expense. And I assure you, there are full-grown adults–with children–earning just that amount.

And you better bet doctor visits are not that cheap. And that’s the cash price, that they will charge you WITH A DISCOUNT because thanks to your cash payment they don’t have to deal with administrative or collection costs.

Think about that. And ask yourself why so many of your own countrymen/women are so willing to watch you stay sick or die just so they have ten extra bucks in their paycheck.

No, the government should not track individual people’s BMIs. (If it tracks trends, I’m not quite as concerned about that, as long as personal data are not attached to the information. I still wonder why they’d bother, but it’s not as much of a privacy threat.) But guess what? Some necessary things in life are expensive, and it’s easier if everyone pays a little bit of a big thing than if every individual is left to cope with the full price alone.

And hey, if the Constitution is an issue, I’m not above changing it to cover health care. Seriously. Let’s write up an amendment and get it ratified. I’m game if you are.

There’s a lot of talk about what kind of changes a person goes through who has lost a lot of weight. I thought I would share what I’m going through at the moment even though I’m nowhere near goal. Twenty-two pounds gone is more than enough to start noticing a difference. I mean, shit, I noticed differences between 130 and 135–like, I would have better cheekbones at 130. It just takes a bit more loss to notice when you’re already a fattie.
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