Health care debate may soon be moot

By Jim Thompson
For The Highland County Press
Liberals keep trying to make the case that health care is some sort of fundamental right. I don’t recall any constitutional amendment being adopted creating this condition.
However, this month the Supreme Court is going to hand down an opinion on Obamacare, giving us their opinion. It is timely to review a few recent activities and, before my word count is up, supply what may be a surprising prediction on the subject.
Let’s start with women’s health.
Liberals have been trotting out an argument about protecting women’s health as something for which we should all be in favor, as they define it – code for birth control and abortion rights. As reported by KHOU in Houston, Texas, an undercover video was recently made in a Planned Parenthood office in Austin, Texas.
The Planned Parenthood worker is recorded essentially approving a plan to obtain a sonogram and then abort the fetus if it is a girl. Of course, liberals don’t think fetuses are people; thus, a female fetus is not a woman, or a potential woman, and their protection of women’s rights argument holds.
But wait a minute, also in the last few weeks, it has been reported by a number of sources that if a guest is coming into the White House who is pregnant, the fetus must be counted as a visitor, i.e., a human being. This brought out the liberal Huffington Post, back on May 8, with a
“clarification.”
Their clarification, taken from the “Washington Free Beacon” (whatever that is), is that the Secret Service says the fetus has to be counted only if the mother is likely to give birth while in the White House. (Splitting hairs.)
Then, on May 31, the U.S. House of Representatives, primarily due to Democrats’ no votes (20 no’s by the Dems, 7 no’s by the Repubs), failed to pass the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2012, which would have prevented sex-selection abortion in the United States.
The Democrats have gotten themselves into a place where they have to thread a very tiny needle with a hair thin filament to navigate the above mess.
Then comes Mayor Bloomberg of New York, planning on banning sugary drinks over 16 ounces in size, starting in the fall.
His logic, of course, is that if the government is going to buy your health insurance, they can tell you what you can and cannot put in your body. If you want something from the government, expect them to take a freedom from you – they have been doing this forever.
My prediction, however, is this. In 20 years, none of this will matter, for health care costs are about to drop through the floor. Here is why. Doctors are going to be replaced with computers in many cases.
You are already participating in this if you go to WebMD or some similar site for your first diagnosis. You will do this more often as these sites develop better intelligence.
After all, the primary skill of a doctor is a near-savant ability to memorize zillions of things and pull the right ones out when presented with a set of symptoms. Computers can do this and they do it better every day. The general practitioner is rapidly obsolescing.
When medicines come off patent, they often end up over the counter and economical. If not OTC, they are still prescribed and economical.
Thousands of miracle medicines of the past couple of decades will be coming off patent in the next few years and their prices will drop through the floor.
Already, the problem is such medicines are in short supply (about 250 of them, by latest reports from Reuters) because they are now so cheap no one wants to make them.
Imaging equipment is about to become ubiquitous and cheap. Self-imaging from home via your smart phone will be here very, very soon, by 2015 at the latest. This will join your WebMD-like programs to bring a first screen diagnosis, freeing doctors from much of what they do now. But first, even before this, you will be able to snap pictures of warts and lesions on the surface of your body and let the software do a diagnosis.
Surgeons are already using robots and in some cases, they are not even in the operating room or even in the hospital – they are far across the country. Specialized surgeons doing operations all over the place from one location is almost a reality now. This will drive down the price.
Air travel went from non-existent to only for the rich, to available to nearly everyone.
Likewise with the telephone, radio, television and computer.
Health care is on the precipice of doing the same thing. Live two decades more and health care will be so cheap it will not matter who is paying for it.
Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.
[[In-content Ad]]