Ron Paul’s Straight Talk on Health Reform

"With Congress on recess, America is momentarily in the eye of President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform storm. Now is the perfect time to get a second opinion to the president’s diagnosis, and who better to give one than a real doctor: Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas).

Dr. Paul has practiced medicine since the 1960s. His website says that, “as a specialist in obstetrics/gynecology, Dr. Paul has delivered more than 4,000 babies!” He has served in Congress for varying lengths of time since the 1970s, and through it all he has remained true to the principles of our Founding Fathers as embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Dr. Paul writes a weekly column called “Texas Straight Talk,” and several of these have recently dealt with healthcare reform. Looking to a doctor who has practiced medicine for decades seems like a wise course of action that will help determine whether or not President Obama’s prescription for America is the correct one.

On July 20, Dr. Paul wrote “Healthcare is a Good, Not a Right.” He explains the difference between rights and goods: “Natural law states that people have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A good is something you work for and earn.” A good may be a “need,” like food or employment or medicine, but confusing the two, as Dr. Paul says, “has troubling consequences.”

No one has to pay for someone else to exercise their right to life or liberty, for example, though we have enacted laws to criminalize murder and to protect free speech. But someone always has to pay for a good, be it healthcare or food or a clothing. As Dr. Paul says, “If there is a ‘right’ to healthcare, you must force the providers of those goods, or others, to serve you.”

Now, “obviously, if healthcare providers were suddenly considered outright slaves to healthcare consumers, our medical schools would quickly empty.” But President Obama is graciously volunteering to have government step in, pay for the goods, and referee this kind of servitude. Medicare, Social Security, and the U.S. Postal Service are all going broke, yet Obama claims the cost of “Medicare for Everyone” will somehow be covered. Dr. Paul describes it like this:

The government will be paying the bills, forcing doctors and hospitals to dance more and more to the government’s tune. Having to subject our health to this bureaucratic insanity and mismanagement is possibly the biggest danger we face. The great irony is that in turning the good of healthcare into a right, your life and liberty are put in jeopardy."

-- Continue here http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/health-care/1607

A really good article.