Issue Position: Health Care

Issue Position

Before government began exerting significant control over healthcare, our Union had the most affordable, highest quality healthcare in the world. Charitable organizations and health care providers were effective in ensuring availability of expensive procedures to those unable to afford them. Contrary to the direction we are headed, localities and individuals themselves are naturally responsible to make medical decisions and participate in insurance programs that guarantee availability of quality healthcare. Local level control makes positive outcome likely for cost pooling programs and ensures that needs are more efficiently and cost effectively met. Centralizing control in Washington DC only works to enrich the connected. I believe that we should move back to a locally controlled free market in health care that places the doctors, patients, and locally controlled insurance pools in control of healthcare. The only legitimate position of federal authority is in guaranteeing freedom of association. States that disallow interstate insurance coverage prevent competition and raise costs. Medical providers, the same as any individual or business, should not be coerced to provide service to anyone.

Congressional legislation should be enacted to recognize a patient's liability for their own decisions belongs to them solely. Blaming doctors or pharmaceutical companies for healthcare gone awry denies a basic tenet of freedom of association: personal responsibility. Patients who are part of failed procedures or experimental pharmacology blame the entities providing them service when in fact there are no guarantees for the success of any medical procedure and permanent injury or death are unavoidable options. Rather than politically manipulated, false senses of safety, open public discourse concerning the reputation and track record of professionals provides healthcare consumers a reliable confidence in pursuing treatment or choosing not to. The popularity of shifting liability from decision makers to the medical provider saddles the medical industry with extremely high costs due to insurance, litigation, settlements, and judgements. A functioning health care system cannot sustain the illogical and costly spreading of liability from patients to providers nor the federally enforced monopoly positions of the insiders gaming the system.

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