On Healthcare

To begin, it might be worthwhile for readers to check out the article that inspired my thoughts this time around (it should be linked above, but just in case: http://www.hslda.org/hs/state/mi/201111290.asp).

What bothers me the most about the abuse that health care professionals are able to practice is that they are only able to carry it out because of the trust they receive from society and the support that they receive from the State. The United States of America is fortunate enough to enjoy the benefits of a health system that more or less operates autonomously from State control...relatively speaking.

It still puts up with Medicare/Medicaid.
It has the Food & Drug Administration to deal with.
There's a good chance private insurance will be a thing of the past if our Hopeful Leader has anything to say about it.

What could possibly go wrong? Except the violations of human rights that you see every day in countries where decisions about patient care are taken out of the hands of patients and put into the hands of members of an establishment.

Doctors in the Netherlands exercise euthanasia without explicit patient permission.
Special boards in the United Kingdom use the following calculation to determine who receives treatment: #of productive taxpaying years remaining - cost of treatment = X, where X must be a positive amount in order for the patient to be treated.
Children receive dangerous treatments without a reasonable risk assessment in Michigan because the doctor is inflexible in "this type of case".

My only hope if State control of health care in the U.S. increases is that if I ever need serious medical treatment I might be able to afford a Carnival Cruise to the Bahamas where an Ivy League graduate will perform my surgery using recycled scalpels that a good autoclave sterilized but were still deemed "unusable" in the nation of my birth because of a government regulation. And maybe my transplanted kidney came from a person suffering from poverty in Guatemala. My life is on the line, and the decisions foisted on me by a controlling State leave me with fewer options, fewer chances to exercise survival in a way that is consistent with liberty.

How is the State's control of medical care supposed to help anyone prosper if it enforces its opinions on what life, particularly the life of its slaves, are worth? In ancient Rome many slaves enjoyed practical autonomy from their masters, even being serviced by other slaves because they were so valuable to their masters through their intelligence or productivity...yet in the end, when they became sick, or old, or an accident befell them, the common practice of a Slave master was to end his liability.

I am not a liability, nor is any person who is willing to put their self on the line and say "I am a person, not your property."