Free Health Care for Everyone Doesn't Really Include EVERYONE

Before you get all excited about HillaryCare or ObamaCare providing free health care to "everyone," take a look at who the British (whose system Hillary and Obama wish to copy) are considering excluding:

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

(red emphasis mine)

Gee, here I thought the government could really provide free care to everyone.

Moral of the story: Never believe it when a politician says they can give you something for free... unless it's hot air.

Another Preview of HillaryCare (or ObamaCare)

I guess the UK's National Health Service is staffed with fans of Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

The UK Nanny State just revealed its latest agenda item and it is decidedly ghoulish. Last week, British (but really Scottish) Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, announced his support of a Labour government plan to snatch the body parts of any citizen. The good news is that this policy only applies to dead people. The bad news is obvious. This is the ultimate death tax, surgically extracted.

Without any apparent squeamishness, Gordon Brown backed the Presumed Consent Scheme (they often call programs “schemes” in England) to redress the demand for transplanted organs by fiat. Here’s the deal. Rather than go looking for those bothersome donor cards on a fresh cadaver, the British populace is now fair game. If you don’t specifically carry a card saying “leave my corpse alone” -- known as “the opt out option”, or unless one’s family is on hand to object, one’s remains are considered fair game for an organ harvest festival.

The justification for adopting Presumed Consent is a function of a recognized market deficit. The Government has noticed that 1000 patients die annually while waiting for a critically-needed transplant. Another 8000 are on various organ waiting lists hoping to get lucky when they go critical or for just the right replacement part to turn up in the chop shop.

According to the NHS Organ Donor Registry, there are more than 14 million Brits who have voluntarily listed themselves as donors, however, one third of all families refuse consent for organ donation when a loved one dies, usually in unexpected circumstances. In typical fashion, the government plans to overcome this donor reluctance by setting up -- you guessed it -- a new Task Force to enlighten the populace about the importance of giving this gift of life.

Read the whole thing... as usual, the link is in the title of this post.

A Conservative Way of Providing Medicine to the Poor

Health care for the poor does not, I say again, not have to flow from the government. Just ask the people of Warren County, VA:

Warren County, Virginia, at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Shenandoah River has neither the rolling hills of horse country nor the fertile plains of the Shenandoah Valley.

Of its 36,000 citizens, an estimated 6,000 are uninsured. Typically, when they get sick, the uninsured go to the emergency room, which is about the most inefficient and costly way of delivering primary medical care.

But, thanks to the initiative of some local Christians, the uninsured of Warren County can instead go to the St. Luke Community Clinic for free medical care. In FY 2006, 2,633 uninsured people did just that.

St. Luke Clinic is one of an estimated two thousand Free Clinics around the country, fifty of them in Virginia. In 2006, the total budget of all the Free Clinics in Virginia was about $18 million, which they leveraged to a value in excess of $80 million.

The Free Clinic movement is living embodiment of many conservative principles: the principles of subsidiarity and voluntarism, the spirit of enterprise and of community self-reliance. As health care becomes more and more of a national concern, if people are truly concerned about the less fortunate, there should be a population explosion in the number of free clinics around the country.

Please note, there are Free Clinics and then there are "free clinics":

Free Clinics are private, non-profit organizations that provide medical, dental, pharmaceutical and/or mental health services at little or no cost to low-income, uninsured and underinsured people. These clinics are truly free - both to their clients and to the taxpayers.

Unlike federally-qualified so-called "free clinics", they do not submit receipts to Medicare or Medicaid for reimbursement. St. Luke and the other authentic Free Clinics in Virginia do not submit bills to anybody for reimbursement.

How do they do it? Volunteers.

The small staff includes one part-time doctor, but most of the medical skills come from the volunteer nurses, doctors, labs, and hospitals.

And don't tell the lefties, but the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil pharmaceutical companies help out a lot.

The biggest chunk of the leverage is pharmaceuticals. Every major pharmaceutical company has a free donation plan, or Patient Assistance Program. By maximizing those programs, St. Luke was able to dispense 31,134 prescriptions in 2006. However, every company has different medications, rules, forms, and schedules. The process is so complicated that the clinic employs two staff members work on it only slightly less than full-time. In 2006, the Free Clinics in Virginia provided about $42 million worth of donated medications to all their patients.

This is how you get health care to those with no insurance. Instead of installing a government program, you Americans, among the most generous people on the face of the planet, offer their services for free. The government can help, tho.

All the good intentions in the world would not make a free clinic possible in our litigious society. But that problem has been solved in Virginia, whose example could easily be followed.

With the help of the Virginia Association of Free Clinics, the state recently established the "VaRISK2" liability risk management program. Operating under the Division of Risk Management of the Department of the Treasury, of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the program indemnifies Directors, Officers, employees, and volunteers in a Free Clinic.

Volunteers in private medical clinics received federal tort claim coverage when Senator Dan Coats' 1996 Medical Volunteer Act became law as part of the Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Care Reform Act. Prior to Coats' action, only volunteers in government-funded clinics typically received coverage for liability at the federal level.

And it's that simple. No HillaryCare needed.

Health Care Questions

Dennis Byrne has a few questions about HilllaryCare II:

How do you make Americans sign up for universal health insurance?

So, what happens when someone refuses to get the health insurance that would be mandated by two Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.)?

If an uninsured patient shows up at a doctor’s office or hospital emergency room, is he refused care? Does he have to produce evidence that he can pay? Will he be required to sign up on the spot for health care coverage before receiving care?

Good questions... will Hillary answer?

Probably not without a lot of pushing. She doesn't want to tell people that what she's proposing is really socialized medicine.

HillaryCare, Again

Well, we knew it was gonna happen... Hillary has proposed reforming health care, again. But, this time, she promises it's not government-run.

And I have some oceanfront property to sell. In Nebraska.

Peter Ferrara explains:

Hillary Clinton’s plan starts out very simply: she will mandate under federal law that everyone in America must buy health insurance, and by this she supposedly achieves universal coverage. The catch, of course, is that once you start down the road with this mandate, you end up with government-run health care.

If you are going to require people to buy health insurance, then the next question which follows is, exactly what do they have to buy to fulfill this requirement? Suppose they buy the Fraternity Plan that pays only for unlimited beer and pizza during the weekends? Have they satisfied the requirement?

The serious point is if you are going to require people to buy health insurance, then you are going to have to specify exactly what health-plan people will have to buy to satisfy this requirement. So the government has gone from telling you that you need health insurance, to telling you what kind of health-insurance coverage or plan you must have. And with Hillary, we can assume that this will be no basic, minimum plan. But Hillary continues to insist that this is not government-run health care.

And this, of course, is only the beginning. Special interests will swarm to get their favored coverage in the required plan. People will merrily get used to billing everything in the plan to the insurance company. And costs will rise.

People will start complaining that they can’t afford paying for this costly coverage, and whining that the government must do something. The government itself will already be paying for a lot of this coverage, and budgets will therefore explode.

So the government will do something to control costs. It will start rationing. It will start telling people what services and treatments they can have, and when. It will start delaying access to new innovations. It will squeeze payments to health care providers so much that the providers will start rationing what they provide. Government guidelines will start dictating to these providers that they ration care, and how to do it. After a while, people start to realize, “hey, we have government run health care.”

And voila! Socialized medicine for the 21st century.

The problem is, Hillary introduced it too soon. Perhaps she feels the need to get the coverage off General Petraeus, perhaps there are other considerations, but with well over a year to pick apart this plan, the chances of it seeing the light of day are about the same as a snowball's in... well, you know.

Added @5:38 PM: Dan McLaughlin at RedState says of HillaryCare

She said she could envision a day when "you have to show proof to your employer that you're insured as a part of the job interview — like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination," but said such details would be worked out through negotiations with Congress.

Proof of health insurance, yes. Proof of citizenship, no; that would be unfair and mean-spirited. Also, it's racist to require proof of citizenship and eligibility to vote.