Health Care Crisis ... Part 1

The left has everyone convinced that there is a health care crisis.

In fact, during the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain was so scared that he would lose votes over the health care "crisis" that his staff had to come up with their own health care plan, because he believed he would lose a significant number of votes if he didn't.  And he was probably right. The American people now believe we have a health care "crisis."

In fact, when politicians refer to the health care "crisis," there is never any question from the media (MainStream or otherwise, for the most part) about whether or not there even is a crisis. The only question is how to solve it.

I'd like to submit that there really is no crisis in health care.

There are problems and issues.  They can be solved without the government taking the whole system over.  But there is no crisis.

My first point in this argument (against a crisis) is that most people who do not have health insurance have chosen not to have health insurance.

That, of course is a generalization, and you probably wouldn't have to look far to find an exception or two. But I think the generality is accurate.

Of course, there are many ways you can make a choice. Sometimes your choices are consequences of other choices. For example: If you choose to screw off in high school and not go to college and have no basic skills that would allow you to hold down a decent job, you've essentially made a choice to have no health insurance, unless you qualify for "welfare health care."

Other times, a choice is a matter of priorities. Some folks choose to have three cars in the driveway and makes sure their kids have four video game consoles, and that everyone in the family has cell phones, goes out to eat 5 or 6 times a week, that there are 500 cable channels on the 5 household TVs and that there is a large library of CDs, DVDs and iPods in every kid's backpack ... and there just isn't money left to pay the health insurance premium. That's still a choice.

Some folks play the odds game. They decide that at age 30 and in good health that the chances they'll need to spend a couple of thousand dollars for health care is low, so why spend a couple of thousand on health insurance premiums? Again, a choice is made.

I know that most people who don't have health insurance and who have made choices that leave them without insurance think we have a health care crisis. It's too bad they've made the choices they've made, when they could have made better choices.

What's even sadder is that they've convinced everyone else that they don't really have a choice.