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Hellbender said:
Most of the uninsured are that way because they don't want to pay for it. Put them in Medicare A, and if they aren't on SS, make them pay for it. make them pay for their kids.
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the wealth of the upper class will become Hillary's carrot to lead the lower class. Then everyone will have the same piss poor health care.

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Hellbender - several points:

(1) In the first place, I've already got piss-poor health care. My wife and I pay $7200 a year in premiums for medical disaster insurance - $5000 a year deductible on each of us. We've never had a claim on it, and I hope to God we never do.

That means, just like the uninsured, we pay all our own medical bills out of our pocket - PLUS $7200 a year for nothing.

(2) You're right - I DON'T want to pay for more insurance. I could pay double our present premium, about $14,000 a year, and then insurance would pay 80% of the bill every time we go to a doctor with the sniffles. But I think the price I'm already paying is outright robbery and it would be extremely stupid of me to choose to give them even more money.

(3) No conservative, as you claim to be, would write "make them pay for it, make them pay" when talking about expanding a government program. That's not conservatism, it's liberalism/socialism.

Government has just a few legitimate functions - the things that we can't do as individuals and have to band together to accomplish. Those include national defense, police protection, firefighting, building roads, and possibly (though I have grave reservations about this one) public education.

In my opinion, government was performing all of its legitimate, limited functions about 100 years ago in 1907. There wasn't even an income tax then - and that was the start of socialism in 1913 when the income tax began. That's when citizens instead of import tariffs started having to directly pay for government.

Socialism expanded greatly during the Roosevelt Administration with programs like Social Security and new taxes to pay for them. Even bigger moves toward socialism came during the Johnson Administration with Medicare and many other new programs and taxes.

Now, we're almost all the way there to European-style socialism - a system that has never worked at any time or place in the history of man. Every country that's tried it has found it causes runaway inflation, inefficiency, unemployment, and private enterprise having to go underground. It's estimated that 75% of Italy's economy is in the black market to avoid extortionate taxes. Britain has "tax refugees" living all over the world to avoid the British tax system.

Right now, the Euro is up and socialism is looking successful because goods are being manufactured in third-world countries for peon wages and sold for high prices in developed countries. That's a temporary, temporary situation - those third-world countries won't work cheap for long and within a decade or two the cost of all this is going to have to be paid for at home.

Letting government take over our health-care system will just about complete our turn to socialism - and I'm surprised you're for it.

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