I think that Ron Paul--sorry to jump straight to him if that's not at all related to the video--is right on nearly everything except for this. Although it might, for lack of bureaucracy's sake, be better to decide on this as states, the central government has the responsibility of watching over and making laws about the transactions that occur between states, to ensure that the rights of each state's citizens are not violated by those of another.
Medical care, done by medical companies, should be considered a commodity in every sense of the word by Ron Paul, and a centralized system (or governmentally regulated body) , even one that would only do oversight on an extensively privatized health care system--as that is probably the most we would (be allowed to) accept--should be considered as perhaps financially irresponsible but morally imperative. It should be considered whether or not an agency that regulated the amounts of drug costs to keep competitiveness alive, i.e. to encourage competition by not allowing drug companies to force neighboring state's companies out of business and growing into what are today the centralized health care structure, could be tolerably defended by the rhetoric that Ron Paul references. Mr. Paul consistently employs his career as an OBGYN physician to defend his stance on abortion and to support comments regarding the very valid logic that connects reasonable thinking in medicine to reasonable government policy: "If you're a doctor and you realize you've made the wrong diagnosis, you don't continue with the same course of treatment," or something to that effect. If Paul were President of the United States of America, if he is the man that "wants to be President of the country, and not of the Republican party"--i.e. a metapartisan "champion of the Constitution," that dwindling sunset daydream, then he could and should consider national health care a possible solution to the American paradox. The one that sees a congress overpowered by donations to their electoral campaigns from companies which are corruptly treating their own paying customers as little as possible, and promising through this strategy a most superior level of care to those who escape the economic hand of God run by investigators receiving commissions for health-incapacitating and debt-inducing fraud. Less are treated now for fear of their drain on our private sector health industry may damage the level of care for the people allowed to be cared for by the people who have taken oaths to care for everyone. Paul should know that doctors who uphold their oath to the unmitigated application of the latest scientific knowledge as it applies to universal human health--as he treated many patients for free--are dedicated to saving lives, not, at heart, to making money; not at the expense of denying care to those who do not form the network of not merely the insured but the treated in this country. Why would doctors participate in a system that produces less health at its best and for its richest than the bums of London enjoy from the state? Wouldn't common sense admit that a union between government and industry can work if the system is properly regulated by his future lean, mean and extremely efficient due to its low-amount-of-services-offering government? That universal health care is a realizable and possible (as plentiful international models show) and is not the same as a charity, because it is the people's taxes that pay for it. That a private sector unable to motivate itself to treat all its customers will ever ensure the health of all Americans, and that offering a service to deliver corporate advertisements through the mail to encourage consumption is more important than a government program delivering health. Paul argues this is impossible to receive, and this argument has its points: We are a fat country that eats at big chain restaurants, a cancer and heart-disease paradise, a country of people dying from our borrowed excesses. "We are a country that is living way above our means," he has said in reference to our financial situation, a government of overspending, taxing and inflating, but we are a country pushed by market advertising to consume more--not through mind tricks or addictive substances, but a tendency towards laziness produced by streams of photographs; a market driven to consume through the psychological parameters of the television; a television of very few minds. It is not only the government's money which subsidizes it, it is the market itself.
Though Paul does not see a distinction economically between the market and the population, and therefore champions limited regulation of the market as ensuring individual liberty, a point in Michael Moore's film by a bold english speaker, was that although the free market enables a multiplicity of possible choices, it does not guarantee one the ability to choose; debt limits the options and demanding power of the population, and Paul agrees with that. Can the market not, as is the case is with firefighters and police, and all administrative services that governments of all sizes offer, be averted altogether for the benefit of the public? Private police departments enforcing public ordinances, private firefighters fighting selective fires?
The market is, if a reflection of society, a market divided; it wars against itself from top to bottom. The consumer society is encouraged only to debt in exchange for convenience by bankers and business, and the health care system is the business that profits from the excess of the other industries' successes.
If Paul is right that subsidizing the health care industry, i.e. individual health care companies taking part in government programs and making vast amounts of money doing it, is the best way to get ever deteriorating health care, then he is only attacking the idea of fascist corruption. The government should invest, though Paul would be against any generalized idea, in programs that give the entire country useful social services like armies, the post office, repairing highways; he is a realist who has accepted the existence of a federal government which provides said services, but often citing those writers of the Federalist Papers who had not yet exercised its oversight and service-offering responsibility as experts, in principle, of how centralized government should disburse these services (excluding the army) the best: by staying out of the market. But I have one critique: That is to say, with regards to the founders, that their wisdom in staying neutral and becoming involved in the transactions of the states as legal mediator also comes with an ignorance of a modern perspective of health industries that have chosen to offer less care and to let people requiring extensive treatment die so that they can help people with less complicated illnesses more efficiently and with greater profits for its board and shareholders. Paul is pro-life when it comes to abortion, and believes that a state would have a right to decide laws regarding abortion that the American congress does not, but does not support sustaining that life with centralized system that would require and fund the health industry. Does the federal government have no responsibility to protect interstate health? Only to encourage its demise by ensuring health care companies aren't held to any governmental standards? Only by state governments? Even if it's a national problem, and 50 million are uninsured?
Realism, I see, as being open to accepting the current state of the system, and idealism as envisioning the alterations that could improve or replace it. But if Paul doesn't believe that in the possibility of universal health care on principle, then he will have abandoned common sense in denying the success of other countries, who offer care for all.
I would hope that he would reconsider his position, and am interested in hearing some differing opinions.
