In the life times of us old baby boomers, the country has changed a lot. In the 50's there were plenty of crippled people. There were people with scars, growths and tumors, even visible ones on their faces. We shared our class rooms and families with retarded children, victims of polio, diphtheria, and scarlet fever. We saw our grandparents suffering in deep depression as they sank into sickness and death. We saw people in our families or neighborhoods locked up in insane asylums. Those cutesy. nostalgic shows about the 50's left out a lot. In the 50's the heartbreaks of the world were plainly visible even to children.

Because such things were right in front of us, we were taught not to stare, to treat people decently, to help people with small things, like picking up things they dropped or helping them read labels in the grocery store or giving them directions, or just talking to them a little when they speak to us.

This is not to say there were no mean folk and no evil in the world. It is just to say that we saw enough to spend the decades since then trying to arrange our world in such a way as to help people. Our parents, who struggled through a depression as children and World War II as adults, were our partners in this, in spite of the rebellions of the hippies and the flower children.

We did a good job, as far as we went. Impetigo is nothing these days. Young people don't even know what whooping cough is, other than part of the name of one of the shots the babies get. My grandmother's baby girls might have lived had they been born today. Peoples' bad hearts can be repaired or, praise God!, replaced. Deformed people can be made prettier. Disabled people can be made to walk,. to read, to make a living.

It was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, we underestimated the job. We did not eliminate the mortal restrictions on our pursuits of happiness. We only moved the line a little.

There is now a growing class of people, whose present lives were bought at great expense, and whose continued existence requires continued huge expenditures in medical care. Transplant recipients, for example, and they can't even work for whatever expensive life span they have left. Cancer patients, many of whom are still children or who have young children who need parenting. Babies with severe congenital disabilities, who can now be saved, but who will require a lifetime of major medical care. And now millions of us baby boomers are entering retirement and old age.

The writing is on the wall. It is clear by now that the money is just not going to be there. Now who wants to be the one to tell such people that the purse is empty, they're on their own? Not me.

But you have to look at the other side too. Already these people are taking up so much of our money that common working folk can't get any medical care at all. People who are actually earning money and paying some taxes … and taxes are certainly needed in order to pay for all those sick people … can't get anywhere near a doctor. Their health deteriorates until they can no longer work and then they are added to the public burden, instead of working and contributing to the public wealth.

While we were busy being overly ambitious and insufficiently realistic, the medical industry was busy developing a huuuuuuge sense of greed and corruption. Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare and Marcus Welby are dead. Doctors and hospitals these days have little trouble turning desperate patients away. People die on the street. People suffer terribly. Families do without the income and help from their members who are too sick to contribute. And all the while Doctors spend their talents on cosmetic procedures, tests and check-ups on wealthy and healthy people and other lucrative but worthless functions. Why should you treat poor people who require a lot of work and can't pay when you can get rich doing maintenance health care on patients with good paying insurance or lots of money? Someone should count the number of little boys on medicaid who suffer through circumcisions. Or check the percentage of children on Ritalin who are on medicaid. A woman on medicaid may run up a bill of $80 or more for a pregnancy test at a doctor's office while a poor woman pays a dollar for the same thing from the local Dollar Tree.

Every time you complain about the expense and greed of doctors, they come back at you with all that mess about how many years it takes them to get their license and how they save lives and all that. Both of those claims are in question. We've already mentioned how doctors spend more time doing pointless procedures on insured and wealthy people than in treating truly sick and suffering folk. That part of how long it takes them to get the necessary education doesn't hold water either.

Police also save lives and it properly takes a police officer a good many years of experience, accompanied by ongoing training, to do a decent job. A large number of officers get precious little by way of fringe benefits. Commonly, the stress of the job causes physical ailments that the compensation package will not pay for. And so part of the reason we have problems with the quality of our police is that they turn over before they ever get the experience and training they need to do good work. If saving lives and long training time is a good reason for doctors to get rich, why does it not apply to police?

Yes, the writing is on the wall. And what have our brilliant public leaders come up with as a solution? They want to install mandatory health insurance for every man, woman and child in the country. Those who are blessed with good health will be required to pay for all those sick people. They will also be required to pay the bills for people who are deathly ill because they've spent 40 years drinking and doping away their health. They'll be required to pay the bills for people who have spent decades drinking and doping away their own good health. They'll be required to pay the bills for people who decline so much as 30 seconds of exercise in year, while consuming nothing but big macs and bacon. And our children will be required to start paying the bills for such people before they ever get a chance to make any decisions about what sort of standards and ethics they may or may not establish in their own lives.

Worst of all this will not fix anything. Burdening our children with these things will not help. It will only extend those mortal limits just a little farther. And soon in the future it will hit the wall again, And when you are already taxing the children, where are you going to find any more people to pay the bills?

Most of the working poor these days, who have to live mainly without medical care, do not believe they will get any under a mandatory health insurance system. Medical insurance is merely a c,,onduit for channeling money. History shows that the more money that is in the conduit, the more crooks there are who help themselves to it without helping anybody. To the poor, that means that being too poor to get any health care will soon be the good old days. In the near future they still will not get any care, but they'll have to pay for it anyway.

There is already mandatory “insurance” in the form of the social security tax. You pay for years, and supposedly if you get sick and disabled and can't work you will get help. A lot of people die waiting on that help.

With mandatory health insurance you will probably “live” longer because doctors will use your dying body … or even your already dead body, hooked up to wires and tubes …. on which to practice all manner of easy maintenance procedures and diagnostic tests. If you haven't had a circumcision yet, that would be a good time for the doctor to give you one. And then bill your insurance for it.

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