Because it’s just what the good socialist doctors ordered. The American Academy of Family Physicians has concocted a draft plan calling for what amounts to a single payer health care system that would guarantee health care to everyone.
The problem with such universal health care systems is that they make decisions about how health care will be delivered at the national level, often to the detriment of some people’s health. For example, most European nations have far lower survival rates for people diagnosed with cancer. Such socialized medical system typically choose explicitly to cover broad early childhood health and in turn limit aggressive cancer intervention because the former adds more years of life on average than does the latter. Of course someone suffering from cancer, and his or her family, might not necessarily agree that this a good tradeoff.
Not to worry, says the AAFP, this is good for us. “…to achieve universality would almost certainly require, for the good of the many, that certain individuals should be constrained to behave in ways that did not necessarily meet their own narrow individual health or economic interests.”
You might die earlier than you normally would have because the state will be making all of the decisions, but fear not, because your sacrifice will not have been in vain. It will have been for the greater good of society.
This is of course the ultimate statement of liberalism in the United State — putting the state in charge of determining who shall live and who should die. Such a proposal is a dream come true for officious bureaucrats who already think they should be making such decisions on behalf of their ignorant charges.
Source:
“For The Good Of The Many,” Doctors Propose Universal Program. National Center for Policy Analysis, January 21, 2001.