‘Public option’ would negate competition in health care field

Joe Siegel

Special to the Gateway

An open letter to U.S. Sen. Patty Murray in reply to her recent e-mail campaign on health care:

I have 10 questions for you, stressing your concerns about our existing health care system and the Democrats’ proposed health care “public option.” Also, I would ask that you review the economic and political history of the effects centrally planned economies have had on the prosperity and freedom of places like Eastern Europe, Africa, Central and South America. Not to mention the non-productive and statist societies in Canada and Western Europe.

Programs by government decree will always end up distributing privately owned capital (in the form of tax receipts) on political favoritism, the personal ethics of bureaucrats will without fail distort the markets.

This, to paraphrase an old expression, will destroy winners and create losers. Always. The famous economist Frederick Hayek called this arbitrary coercion. I would highly recommend you read one of his books: “The Road to Serfdom.”

Here they are:

Are you going to vote to take yourself off congressional medical coverage and volunteer your family for coverage under a “government option?”

Why is it Canada and Great Britain have cancer survival rates 15 percent worse than ours?

Why is it patients in Canada are being told they’re too old to receive hip replacements because of rationing?

Why is it social welfare states in Europe and elsewhere rarely produce any life-saving pharmaceuticals and rely on our entrepreneurship and creativity? (And risk assumption?)

What will happen to this creativity under the new administration?

Why is it OK for college students under the influence of liberal professors and AFL/CIO workers to parade on May Day with signs that say “Socialist Workers Unite,” requiring police response because of the destruction of private property; for demonstrators to disrupt the Republican National Convention while planning to stage fake emergencies in the New York City subway system to distract the police and prevent them from responding, or for Black Panthers to try to intimidate Republican voters at polling stations, but it’s not OK for citizens to express their anger directly to their elected representatives in town meetings?

And if they are organized, so what?

Why is it only this country, with our time-proven, risk-reward system of entrepreneurship, that invents things like the Internet, GPS, the transistor, modern management/industrial techniques, the airplane, the telephonem et al?

And by inference, do you think this is going to continue, especially in the health care industry, in reference to new drugs and medical techniques — without a profit motive?

Can you please tell me how you, MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the mainstream media would have reacted if President Bush had asked people to send in others’ e-mail addresses if they detect “fishy disinformation” on a government health care proposal?

Can you name one major government program, regardless of its founding altruism, that has successfully and in the long run alleviated rather than initiated societal and economic regression? (Read LBJ’s “Great Society initiatives.”)

And please don’t bring up the Federal Interstate System and the space program. There was no competition in those endeavors, and they would have been accomplished cheaper and more efficiently in the private market.

And last (and obviously rhetorically), why is it about 60 percent of Congress never learns these lessons? I guess they’ll see it when they believe it.

Joe Siegel is a retired major in the U.S. Air Force and is a United Airlines pilot. He lives on Fox Island.