Healthcare Cost Spiral

It started in 1900 with socialist demands that workers’ hospital bills be paid for them by the company.  During World War II, the US government imposed wage controls and told everybody to work themselves to death for the war effort.  Companies, flush with freshly printed government cash decided to offer health insurance to workers.  The Congress made this benefit non-taxable and our fate was sealed.  We would no longer be responsible for ourselves.  But healthcare was still under the control of the Churches and Charities, so, healthcare costs remained low…until the 1960s.  There were propaganda campaigns reminding us to not hurt ourselves, but no mandates….until the 1960s.

For the poor, counties had public clinics and physicians had charity practices…until the 1960s.

In the 1960s we got Medicare, then Medicaid and healthcare costs began to rise.  In the 1970s the Churches and Charities sold most of their hospitals and costs really skyrocketed. Expensive equipment became available and medical specialization became the path forward.

In the 1980s, socialists complained about the county clinics and declared that hospitals had to admit indigent patients for treatment and costs went into the stratosphere.

Then came an uninterrupted barrage of Laws enacted to protect us from ourselves and lawsuits to close down anything that was fun.

We were no longer free to harm ourselves and pay for it.  Now we had a truck-load of “partners” who were paying for our healthcare and they wanted to micromanage us. 

The primary beneficiaries of this debacle were the medical device manufacturers and big pharmaceutical companies and malpractice lawyers and all the parasites who follow this caravan.  Their products would not have found a buyer had this not been a 3^rd party payer scam.

There have been no cures or useful drugs produced since the 1950s. US drinking water was chlorinated in 1908 and penicillin was discovered in 1928. Polio vaccine was developed in 1955.

In the end, in the 1960s, we got hurt more than helped by this “healthcare transformation”.  Socialists are ecstatic, but the US government is broke.

I started my career in the 1960s and always viewed my employee-paid portion of my company health insurance more as my contribution to medical science.

Our Freedom and self-reliance eroded and our costs went up every time government caved-in to socialist Bills.   

We will be much better off if we can get government out of the healthcare business and give it to the free market to fix.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader