Rancho Miller

Click here to see an interview by Rachel Maddow of Frank Schaeffer, former conservative and son of the great evangelical teacher Francis Schaeffer. He makes some legitimate points about unnecessary rowdiness at town halls about health care, as well as descriptions of the Obama administration as Nazis or Obama himself as Hitler. (It’s legitimate, however, that parallels are drawn between the Obama admin and fascist ideology; read Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism.”)

However, he unfortunately also says that all of this demagoguery will lead to violence on the part of conservatives. Unfortunate because the violence has come not from the right, but from the left. Here is one example.

In my interview on Tuesday with Dr. Steven Knope, a concierge medicine pioneer, I asked what he thought about the movement in Washington to impose health care reforms.

His answer:

If you’re talking politics, let’s get it on the table: We’re talking about socialization of the entire country, whether that’s the auto industry, the banks, massive stimulus spending and omnibus bills and TARP. These guys are not playing by the rules, they’re certainly not following the Constitution of the United States. If they decide to put some of these fee-for-noncovered-services concierge practices in their sights, they could make life difficult for certain concierge doctors. It’s just going to depend on how tough these doctors are, how willing they are to fight as to whether or not the administration can get everybody in lockstep with this socialized medicine model. I’ll tell you that it will not happen in my practice. I have several constitutional lawyers in my practice who have already agreed to take this to the Supreme Court if necessary. I will personally never return to a hamster wheel practice again. I will leave the country before I do that. Trust me: I take care of people from Canada who fly to see me. I’ve taken care of people in the English system. My patients have had disasters while traveling in New Zealand. There is nothing — nothing — good about big government managing medicine. It just doesn’t work.

Health insurance is not synonymous  with health care. There’s nothing synonymous about it. If you look at this experiment in Massachusetts, which was very interesting, everybody in the state of Massachusetts has now been mandated to carry health insurance [MM: Although members of health care need sharing ministries have been exempted]. What they’ve rapidly found now is that there aren’t enough primary care doctors to actually see the patients. Now there’s a year and a half wait to see an internist. The ERs are still overflowing now with people who have insurance but don’t have a doctor.  (President Barack) Obama and (U.S. Rep. Nancy) Pelosi and all of these folks who think that you simply insure people and now everyone gets health care are sorely mistaken. This is no more well-conceived and thought out than was the stimulus bill that nobody read. At some point, intelligent people have to stand up on both sides of the aisle and say, ‘Look, I know what you want and I know the kind of utopian values you profess to have, but if the numbers don’t work, then why don’t you explain to me why you think this program is going to work? If Medicare and Medicaid are already scheduled for bankruptcy and we’re already insuring 30 million people on that program, then how are you going to insure and take care of 300 million?’ The numbers don’t work. It’s analogous, when I listen to this politically correct speak, it’s really analogous to dealing with one of your teenage children. ‘Daddy I want it now.’ You say, ‘Look, we live in a real world with a budget. You can’t get a BMW at age 16. It’s not going to happen.’ ‘But I deserve it. My friends have one.’ ‘I understand, but that’s not the reality. The numbers don’t work.’

I’m not hearing even liberal publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Huffington Post for that matter come out and say, ‘Look, these are the numbers of the Obama health care plan and this is why it will work and this is what conservatives don’t understand about it.’ I don’t hear any substantive discussion like that where people are saying, ‘This is why it will work. Let me convince you. You don’t understand.’ It’s this moralistic, utopian, ‘It’s a right, it has to be there, write the check and we’ll figure out later how we get the money into the account.’ It’s just absolutely without any rational thought at all. Not that I’m passionate about this. (Laughs.)

You look at this, you see Boehner standing there, John Boehner, standing there on the floor of Congress, and he drops this 1,100-page stimulus package that he got 11 hours earlier and said, ‘Nobody in this entire Congress has read this bill and we have just spent over a trillion dollars with interest.’ Bam! The thing hits the floor. And if that were not enough then here we are 120 days into this saying, ‘Now we need to do the same thing in health care. We just need to rush this through.’ It’s absolutely irrational.

North Carolina Blue Cross/Blue Shield planned some spots that show national health care in a negative light, but pulled them after Nancy-Ann DeParle, Obama’s “health care czar,” pressured the company’s CEO.

This is completely inappropriate and shows the incredible chutzpah of the Obama administration. This is a chilling effect on free speech by the government. It is an interference of free enterprise (not that we should be surprised by that). It was bad enough when the White House fired GM’s CEO, but the auto industry set itself up for that when it accepted government money.

To top it off, here’s the arrogance of DeParle:

“He said, ‘Well, Nancy-Ann, those aren’t ads. Those were just going to go up on a website,’” DeParle said in an interview in the Old Executive Office Building. “He’s not doing it now.”

What’s next? The White House gets wind of a sermon critical of Obama and calls up the pastor to put the screws to him?

My personal health care reform involves a fairly simple approach: going without health insurance.

That’s blasphemous to most Americans, especially those who lay sleepless at night worrying about the 50 million (or 46 million or 47 million or 47.5 million — the inaccurate numbers vary depending on the media source or politician) people in the U.S. who don’t have health insurance.

Well, don’t cry for me, universal coverage advocates.

For 0ne thing, instead of insurance, I’ve joined (and work for) a direct-sharing ministry called Samaritan Ministries International. Members send money to other members to help them pay the costs of their medical services. Nothing’s guaranteed; that’s where the God part comes in. We trust one another to meet our needs because of the commitment we’ve made as followers of Christ. I’m also a member of SMI’s Save to Share plan, meaning I’m covered beyond $100,000, and its Motor Vehicle plan.

For another thing, I’ve started seeking out alternative approaches to health care and haven’t been disappointed. For one thing, SMI offers a health reimbursement account and a flexible spending account to employees. These are pre-tax dollars that can be used to pay for medical, dental, vision and other health-related needs.

Today, I had a great experience with another type of alternative approach to health care. After hacking my way through another morning with an annoying cough, I decided enough was enough. I drove a few blocks north to Family Quick Care, a “pay-in-full-at-time-of-service” storefront. Walking in without an appointment (which FQC doesn’t accept, anyway), I was directed to a keyboard, where I typed in my personal information and clicked my way through a symptoms chart.

In a couple minutes, a nurse took me into an exam room, where she quickly determined I have bronchitis. Sitting at a PC, she submitted prescriptions for me to the Wal-Mart next door. I was in there for no more than 15 minutes, maybe as few as 10.

After paying a $39 tab at Family Quick Care, I drove to the Wal-Mart, which had already filled part of my prescription. I walked out 10 minutes later with antibiotics ($4) and an inhaler ($48.75).

I drove back to work and dropped copies of the receipts into the basket for FSA reimbursements.

I had, in less than an hour, accomplished what probably would have taken me all day to do otherwise by calling my family doctor and being put on hold before I could make an appointment for later in the day at his office across the river, where I would have likely waited for 10 minutes to an hour past the appointment time.

And it was all done for $91.75, including office visit and meds — at least $10 less than an office visit at my OSF Medical Group would have cost and for much less than a monthly premium would have cost.