The Euthanasia Act of 1994

Medical care in America is burdened by enormous waste in the form of financial transfers to hundreds of thousands of regulators, bureaucrats, lawyers, and other non-providers of medicine who have been attached to the medical care system by government edicts. It is also burdened by high direct taxes paid by all individuals, institutions, and businesses within the system - productive or not.

Techniques of medical care have also been distorted by government meddling through tens of billions of dollars in medical research expenditures directed by bureaucrats with little interest in the ultimate value and efficiency of the products of these programs.

Regardless of these punitive value-subtracted payments, however, Americans have been buying as much medical care as they can afford. Free enterprise, even after taxes, has made American medical care by far the best in the world.

Older Americans, who require the greatest amount of care, have had universal access to this high quality medicine through the welfare subsidies of Medicare and related programs. Medical welfare could be handled largely through direct taxpayer subsidies in much the same way that food stamps now feed 25 million Americans.

Now Mr. and Ms. Clinton are telling us that government medical welfare payments have left too many people out - that many citizens are still without care. Moreover, they say that the government wants to buy care for these additional people, but it doesn't want to pay the market price - a price that has been doubled (at least) by government programs which they are unwilling to dismantle.

Their solution is to destroy the system that they wish to feed upon. Instead of a program like food stamps, they propose the equivalent of price controls on grocery stores and farmers and a card for every American giving free access to everything on the grocery shelves. We shall pay for the card if we are able. If not, they will give one to us. This debate should be about the rights to life, liberty, and property. The tax payers have a right to their property. The physicians have a right to their liberty. Each American has a right to the best life and medical care that he or she can obtain. These rights would be best served by getting the government out of medical care entirely - not by getting the government further into it.

The debate should be about freedom, but in America today that is not going to happen. The Clintons are busy promoting the politics of envy and greed - the promise of something for nothing at someone else's expense, and the people are buying these dishonorable lies.

The people will pay for this gullibility, of course, as they always pay with higher taxes, lower living standards, less freedom, and more powerful and numerous bureaucrats and politicians. This time, however, they will pay more. They will pay with their lives.

The July and October issues of Access to Energy included the standard figure illustrating supply and demand. For reasons clearly illustrated in that figure, price controls always lead to shortages. At artificially lower prices, demand is increased and supply is diminished.