While we are all sympathetic to State Senator Eldridge's recent bout of ill health, careful readers of his comments in last week's newspaper ("Politician to patient," Nov. 8) should take the opposite lesson from his subsequent therapeutic regimen than he apparently has.
Sen. Eldridge is not lucky to have comprehensive insurance coverage that his constituents pay for. He made a choice very early on in his career to work only in the public sector in jobs that provide healthy non-salary benefits. In addition to those employed in the public sector, government in our country mandates health care to the poor, the elderly, and those needing emergency treatment.
The vast majority of the approximately 35 million, or 12 percent, of the citizens outside of Massachusetts who don't have government sponsored coverage, aren't unlucky - they choose not to have coverage. And we can insure the temporarily unemployed for far less than the trillion dollars the Democratic sponsored take-over of medicine will cost our children.
Even the case of the young man at the Spaulding Rehab that Sen. Eldridge cites is contrapuntal. That young man actually had insurance, but the coverage was limited. When they run health care, government bureaucrats will limit medical services far more stringently than private insurance companies do now.
The current administration is starting to do that now with Medicare, and the national government can get away with that because they can't be sued for cutting off benefits. Of course, then there will always be a little extra medical care provided to elected public officials like Sen. Eldridge. And that is a huge problem with a choice-depriving "Medicare for All" system such that Sen. Eldridge advocates. The very rich will still get premier medical care, but the politically well-connected will too.
That isn't the only reason that our nation's health care will cost more when it is socialized. A single-payer system will also eventually be forced to ration care because of the greater fraud, waste, mismanagement intrinsic to all enormous, government-run programs. A recent study reported in the Boston Globe estimates that as much as one out of every 10 Medicare dollars is spent on fraud.
No matter how distasteful the notion of a profit motive is to Democrats like Sen. Eldridge, it is a better way of enforcing fiscal discipline than any politician could.
Don't kid yourself as Sen. Eldridge apparently has. National health insurance is coming, but it won't be an unalloyed boon; for those of us who currently have chosen to insure ourselves, it will largely be a curse. When this newspaper's readers find the quality of their health care has significantly degraded, when Boston's fine teaching and research hospitals go underfunded because all their expenditures don't go solely to paying direct medical care, then voters will have sensationalistic, sententious and simplistic polemics like Sen. Eldridge's to thank.
Brian P. Burke of Stow is an attorney and member of the Republican State Committee.
