Socialized Medicine

The Honorable Ron Wyden
405 E. 8th Suite #2020
Eugene, OR 97401

Senator Wyden:

My name is Carden Gambee and I’m writing you from Glendale, AZ although I am a registered voter in Junction City, Oregon. I am finishing my first year of Medical School, and while I have written you a few times, I have yet to write about something that I feel very close to seeing as I am spending basically every waking hour studying for tests in preparation to serve as a physician, probably in Oregon at some point in the near future. T

his has to do with the idea that socialized healthcare is the answer to our healthcare problems here in America as well as the fact that congress and the O’Bama administration is trying to sneak fast-track language back into the budget that would provide for the socialized healthcare.

I hope I am not too late in expressing the very common opinion that this is not the answer. Besides the trickery of putting this fast track language back in the budget after removing it a few weeks ago due to public pressure, and besides the fact that this budget is going to put myself, my children and my children’s children hopelessly in debt, history has shown us that it just doesn’t work. I have family in Canada, as well as close friends who have seen first hand how socialized medicine benefits almost no-one, other than the insurance companies. My brother is a dentist in Eugene, and he sees the same thing when it comes to giving out free care. There are many problems and I will enumerate just a few:

1) Handouts are rarely appreciated or cared for. People get the idea that someone “owes” them and this just instills the attitude that we don’t have to work for anything in life. My brother has seen this as patients that come in to get their “free” care are the most demanding and rude to his staff. While this may not be the case across the board, it still stands that we value what we work for much more than what is given to us as a handout.

2) As my basketball coach told our team many times, “There is NO free lunch.”
The fact is that with the fed printing up all this money and “buying” up debt, we have this idea that money grows on trees. We are being enslaved by this process and as our representative you have the opportunity and duty to help put an end to it.

3) Lines to get care in Canada are ridiculous. I use Canada as an example because this is the type of system that so many who are clueless to how it really works compare us to. People are dying every day, waiting months to get in for a simple office visit. People are sick that shouldn’t be, but doctors’ hands are tied. This system simply does not work.

If you want to make a difference, start with the McCarran-Ferguson exemption that permits insurance companies to engage in behavior permitted to other industries by antitrust law, forming giant conglomerates to fix prices that make it impossible for competitors to enter the marketplace. End Medicare price controls, allowing physicians and patients to negotiate prices, cutting out the pricey middleman insurance companies. Stop tax discrimination against individually owned sickness insurance and allow individuals to purchase sickness insurance across state borders to avoid costly mandates by states. Lastly, expand health savings accounts by removing barriers so that Americans are able to pay for medical bills with before tax money. These are some ideas that will put us in the right direction. Expanding government control and ability to regulate a private industry never helped anyone.

Sincerely,

Carden Gambee
1st Year Medical Student, Midwestern University