A true story of socialized medicine

I had a Navy dentist perform my first cavity filling in 1993. My experience in the VA was considered “top-notch.” The guy was younger than me and I was 20. He drilled a hole in my tooth, filled it with mercury and I swallowed the filling that night in my sleep. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a cavity. He didn’t say I had a cavity. He didn’t say a word to me the whole time. I was a machine and if I asked questions I was slowing down the process which made my level of care even worse. Years later, an actual military doctor saw me. I asked him about a lump in my cheek. He stared through reading glasses and used his magic socialized-medicine x-ray powers to examine me. In 90 seconds of visual inspection he told me a tumor in my cheek was “just a wandering wisdom tooth” that “didn’t need bothering with.”

After escaping federal socialized medicine, I ended up in a real-world hospital. My wisdom tooth magically turned into a tumor and which led to a 4-hour Parotidectomy as my facial skin was separated from my skull to prevent eye loss and protect my salivary gland. I asked for a quote before my surgery but no one in the hospital could answer. They were all dumbfounded as to why a patient was asking for a quote. After it was over, I found the bill and asked some friends in the medical field to interpret. Among other justified important things, they billed me $1,800 for three bags of saline (saltwater). I was fully awake and conscious and being forced to pay $600.00 per bag despite the fact I could drink on my own and was. They were billing me at twice the rate (as they were everybody) in hopes of finally settling at 50% with my insurance company.

$1,800 for three bags of saltwater

Since ACA, insurance company profits are now 3X what they were before the federal gov’t decided to step in. I’ve got friends on Medicare who’ve been told that use of their fingers isn’t a priority to pay for an expensive treatment that a private hospital offers without surgery across the street. I’m tired of being told I am uncompassionate. I am scared because of the level of care we will all receive once this congeals permanently. We force our citizens to buy it. We force our doctors to work inside it. We force our voters to feel guilty for opposing it. We are trusting the very same government to manage and monitor it. But look at the track record of our federal government. Look at the two candidates our system could come up with the choose from last election. Who is really compassionate here? The person who insists on everyone adopting a horrible system in the name of kindness. Or the person who stands against the angry villagers begging them to stop running the country on leveraged emotion? No one has the high ground in this mess. No one will ever truly be held accountable for what we are doing to ourselves. No one will ever be able to simply get up out of the chair or table and say to the doctor, “I do not trust your experience with my life and health.”

We simply won’t have any more choices. This will solve poor health care by ensuring no one has anything else to compare it to. All of our power is being divested into the bureaucracy of America. There is zero compassion in taking someone’s autonomy away. There is zero high-ground through extortion. The ACA is evil by the pre-Christian definition of the word. It is a feeble, weak, idea with no merits and will surely drag our village down. As we all fall singing songs of how compassionate we are, others are gaining more power, influence and profit. This is the very nature of our modern federal government. This is not the first scam, it’s certainly not the last. Each step paved with the heralded stories of a politician’s good intentions.