The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #122219 Message #2694418
Posted By: Rowan
05-Aug-09 - 07:08 PM
Thread Name: BS: Nationalized Healthcare, good? bad?
Subject: RE: BS: Nationalized Healthcare, good? bad?
"Pre-existing conditions" - as genetic science and medica; technoogy progresses its probably going to become evident that most of the ills that affect us are down to "pre-existing conditions".
This is going to be a real nightmare. Although it could be possible to argue that "susceptibility to or vulnerability to" developing any particular condition is not the same as "having the pre-existing condition", attempts by companies to argue that they have ownership and copyright over our genes that they've mapped (an argument that has been successful so far) may mean that every disease can be attributable to a "pre-existing condition.
What would the right-wingers want us to do? Abolish government fire departments, schools, universities, water systems, highways systems, sewer systems, garbage collection, disease control, and make everyone who can afford it buy insurance to cover these services and damn the population who can't?
My understanding of the history of the development of almost all these institutions is that, originally, fire departments, schools, universities, water systems, highways systems were established as privately owned. [Perhaps the Roman roads are an exception but tollways do have a long history.] Most of the major (privately owned) buildings in the older cities on both sides of the Atlantic pond (and a few in Oz) had insurance companies' badges on their exteriors to denote their membership of the insurance policies that paid for the (privately-run) fire fighting agencies and entitled them to have fire protection provided. It was public irritation at the inequities exposed by such systems that got firefighting run as a govt responsibility.
The oldest schools (and even the oldest universities) in the same countries were run either privately; the fact that they were run under patronage of churches and the royal courts might lead the gullible into thinking they were run by what we now understand to be "the govt" but we'll let that slide. The govt run Medibank (later reinstate as Medicare) in Oz are way ahead of what they replaced, similar to what I experienced of the US system.
Ah well...
Cheers, Rowan