Honesty about our healthcare priorities

At fundamental issue is the assumption that health care is a free-market commodity that can only be made available under market conditions.

According to the purists who think so, in a free market system, what is charged is justified by what the market will bear according to the purchase willingness of a majority of those able to pay.

The commodity then gets valued with what the vendor of that commodity self-determines as a "reasonable profit."

Until we withdraw health care from such economic theorizing it will remain essentially a commodity upon which a price can be set and a commodity one can refuse to "sell" based on buyer inability to meet the price.

Is that good for society and good for the country? I'd be interested in any detailed "why" explanations from those who think so.

I personally do not see health care as a commodity equal to the usual consumable commodities bought and sold in various markets.

Neither do I see police and fire control services as marketable commodities that permit a refusal of services to those unable to pay.

And contrary to all those corporate welfare private water companies who believe water is a commodity made available according to ability to pay ... I think those guys can all go to hell and I'll chauffeur them.

This is always fundamentally basic for those who worship and proclaim free-market capitalism as God's preferred arrangement for humans. If the attitude is that everything can and should be valued based on ability to purchase, then we should start plowing up Jesus' lily fields as well as turn all our public hospitals into video rental stores and bowling alleys.

Which means you cannot marry yourself to rigid economic abstractions and a sense of detached intellectual logic while ignoring the cost of human suffering and still consider yourself wise as to the human condition.

The problem for the theoreticians is that genuine reality and human nature is not aware of the "laws" mankind assumes to define for itself. Genuine reality and human nature are oblivious to human astonishment when their best laid assumptions collapse horribly.

It's been my experience that most genuine conservatives understand this and don't go that far in their thinking.

Most who just think they are genuine conservatives and therefore assume that they are thinking like genuine conservatives in truth have no clue

... but make the most noise.