Until last year, I never considered using any form of state subsidy/welfare until I got a bad case of the shingles. I hadn’t seen a doctor in years and I had no money to make an appointment, let alone to pay for the medicines required to get the outbreak under control. I went and applied for state healthcare and was accepted immediately because of my illness.

Under the state program I have never been put on a waiting list, I can walk in and see my doctor anytime, the employees are competent and polite, and the facilities are clean and well-maintained — even better than most private practices I’ve been to.

If this be socialism, let us make the most of it.

My only complaints: the paperwork is overly complicated (although this helps keep illegal aliens away) and the program doesn’t cover anesthetics needed for oral surgery (which I need when I have my wisdom teeth pulled next month.)

Other than that, I’m quite pleased with “socialized medicine.”

Among other points, there is a de facto set of price controls on the vast majority of medical services. The reason for this is that no physician or institution providing medical services may treat Medicare patients unless he or it agrees not to charge any other patients on a fee schedule differing from the standard agreed to with Medicare. Since few areas of medical practice do not involve at least some patients covered by Medicare, relatively few doctors or hospitals are willing to forgo Medicare patients. The private carriers all follow the same classification of “diagnostic-related groups” used by Medicare.

Reimbursements take place at a negotiated discount off the standard fee schedule (this is how differences in fees actually charged are introduced). The standard fees are customarily set high so that the doctors, clinics, and hospitals are paid typically at somewhere between 60 to 70 cents on the dollar billed. They wait typically between 90 to 270 days to be paid.

The only exception to the above are the uninsured, who have to pay 100 cents on the dollar, the day service is rendered. Thus the medical services field offers its cash customers the worst deal, which is entirely the opposite to what any truly free market would dictate.

We need only compare the expediency with which veterinary services are performed for our dogs and cats, and the straightforwardness of the transactions, with the delays and bureaucracy that we experience in our own medical treatments, to see the difference between a relatively free market and one which is constrained and distorted by government regulation and the manipulations of private third-party payers.

I will conclude by saying that I can recall the days before Medicare, when one was charged $5 for a visit to the doctor’s office, and a house call was $10. Look at all the “improvement” in the cost of medicine that has taken place since the politicians stuck their oar in.

– in the USA or the old British empire. To argue against the libertarians, “public” institutions can indeed work well, but only in a social order with a Kantian ethic of duty, an Aristotelean ethic of arete and the awareness that man is a social (”political”) animal, a Catholic/Leo XIII ethic of caritas, and a Franciscan/Benedictine ethic of austere denial for he sake of others. If on the other hand one’s ethics are Hobbes’, Locke’s, Bentham’s, Mill’s, Rousseau’s and Rawls’ (Moore’s) — plus of a religion interested only in one’s solitary salvation by solitary means –, then “public” institutions will not work well. Indeed, it will only be robbery of one person’s means to his private good, by another person to pursue his private good. Nationalism, by the way, is even worse, for this ideology rejects both “the public” and the personal.

To acknowledge that one’s well-being and flourishing as an person is achieved through, with, in, and by life with others (The Common Good) means that “public” will work well. To live so as just to “get mine” and “my group’s” means that “public” will not work well. Moore is just as selfish as his opponents.

2. The broader question: to what extent is personal health a “public” issue and a common good? I myself don’t have the easy answer. It certainly is a common good to be protected from a violent death, be it a death by malice aforethought or by negligence. To argue that it would be self-evident that health would be a prerequisite to human flourishing would mean that the permanently “disabled” and the terminally ill would forfeit their right to health — something morally odious. It also begs the questions as to whether The State should be the provider of the good called health.

3. Cinema, television, and photography are a bad deliberative, demonstrative, and forensic media. They are instead, to follow the old rhetoricians, epideictic and expressive media. And it is open to question if these media fulfill epideictic and expressive ends as well as painting, architecture, sculpture, design, and words.

oh please … my sweet g.m. is brilliant but reminds of how even said smarties can go thru it all, and never have ‘been there’. -?- …in this case put it under the heading ‘to the pure all things are pure.’ [wuv'ya.] albeit…

if you think pharmaceutical state-capitalist “medicine” is today the ‘free market’ … i’ve got a bridge i’d like to sell you – Unbelievably- it, (buckle your seatbelt) -connects [yes] Brooklyn to Manhattan… even though I among many others said that’s NOT a good idea.