Maggie's Farm

As one who has been both a practicing physician, an administrator for a physician practice and a consultant for hospital outpatient department services, this survey is not only a referendum against ObamaCare, but a referendum against the federal governments gradual, but progressive, interference with and control of medical care over the last 50 years.

In reference to the first post, what is "moneterization"? If you meant monetization instead, please elaborate as this is a vague statement.

It seems like you're taking your anger out on a number of private entities - corporations, attorneys, insurance companies, hospitals, etc. - who are only acting in a rational manner based upon conditions imposed by government legislation. Your real beef should be with the politicians in Washington who have changed the rules of the game to suit their agenda or, in modern parlance, "Don't hate the player, hate the game."

ObamaCare is simply another step in the long march by the federal government to socialize medicine. For those not clear about the meaning of that sometime vague term, it means that socialist principles will be applied to medicine. In other words, the federal government will control (and hence effectively own) the health care providers (the means of production). That means that health care providers will owe their allegiance to and follow the commands of the government rather than their patients.

Both patients and providers will increasingly look to the government to provide them with what they seek from what was previously the doctor patient relationship. In any economic transaction - and that's really what health care or any other service boils down to - each party gives up something it has in order to obtain something it values more highly whether this is money, personal satisfaction or happiness, improvement in one's physical condition, etc. Under our new medical systems, this transaction increasingly involves a middle man - the federal government - that determines what constitutes a "fair" transaction. Both suppliers (health care providers) and demanders (patients) increasingly deal with the government, rather than each other, in determining what each will receive. The government increasingly determines how much money health care providers will receive and it increasingly determines how much (in terms of quantity and quality) medical care the patient will receive.

There is nothing finer or more honorable about the field of medicine than there is about the field of law or insurance or hospital administration. There are good and honorable as well as bad and dishonorable practitioners in all of these fields and as long as there is (or was) a free market with suppliers competing for patients based on the quality, quantity and price of the health care they would provide, an equilibrium point or happy medium would be established where both sides would be be not only better off, but the best off that both could simultaneously be. In economic terms, there would be no deadweight loss. With the federal government involved, both parties will have unmet wants - even though the federal government (and heir cronies) will benefit.