Insightful

Victor Davis Hanson describes perfectly the main reason for the dramatic spike in health care costs in recent decades:

"If we wish to get health-care costs under control, then we should at least be honest with the American people and admit that we are all paying a collective fortune largely for three reasons: (1) to keep functioning into their 60s those who drank, smoked, and ate too much and in a past era would have passed on at 60; (2) to give us all an extra three to five years of mobility and functionality after we reach 75; (3) to fit us up with IVs, feeding tubes, and respirators so that in our last six months of life we can die in a rest home or among machines and specialists in a hospital rather than in our own home with a few morphine tablets for pain and a bowl of soup with a straw on the nightstand."

People living much longer + dramatically improved diagnostic techniques, along with advances in drug and surgical interventions = high costs.

Government takeover of the health care system can only achieve a significant reduction in cost by affecting one or both sides of that simple equation. Either people somehow quit living as long (which won't happen because free choice is slowly being taken away from them, a la ever-more draconian smoking bans), or the care given to them must be rationed in order to ensure that everyone receives the lowest common denominator minimum, regardless of the ability and desire to pay out-of-pocket for better treatment than that. That policy has always resulted in endless waits for routine care and denial of services because the patient doesn't fit whatever criteria some bureaucrat decides fits deserving recipients of a particular treatment, as is currently being observed in Canada and Great Britain, among other enlightened nations.

Neal Boortz reveals the true reason why the government is promising to solve such an unsolvable equation, and why they're taking such an interest in our well-being:

"What does it take to convince the American people? This is not about improving your health. This is all about controlling your life. Do you not realize that whoever controls your health care controls you?"

I get it. Do you?

Off to yoga class, before some government apparatchik decrees that I must instead report to the mandatory 6 a.m. calisthenics session with the rest of my cadre. It's for the good of the country, you see.