Let's "Spread the Health"

Before I moved to England, I had heard the horror stories of Socialised Healthcare. All the doctors were bad because they didn't get paid very well and had no incentive to treat people better or improve their profession because there was no reward system to be recognized for good work and everyone got paid the same. This meant that although my doctor was free, my doctor wouldn't be good. I was also aware that I wouldn't be able to choose my doctor or be able to get the treatment I wanted and it would be awful.

I was against it as much as you if not more. That's what I thought anyway, before I tried it.

The truth is, socialism is a part of our life already. Now I know this sounds crazy, but if you look at the definition:

"An economic system in which the basic means of production are primarily owned and controlled collectively, usually by government under some system of central planning."

Examples of this are: taxes, insurance, schools, libraries, fire departments, student loans, social security, welfare, small business grants, government bail-outs, charities, disaster relief, and yep, churches. These are all forms of socialism. Which work well under the umbrella of a democratic republic.

Now, I'm a Capitalist. I don't agree with a Socialist government being in charge of everything in the least. But there are some social programs that we have that make life better, that are optional and allow us to help look out for those that are at the bottom. So for argument's sake, I'm broadly using the label of "socialism"—like everyone else in the news has lately—which is different than Socialism with a capital "S". So again the point I am making is that we all need social programs to get by, and calling someone a Socialist for wanting programs like this is blowing things WAY out of proportion. Because if you do that, we're all under that label for some reason or the other.

To be truly non-socialist, we would pay for our roads individually, our schools individually, our churches individually, put out our own fires, never pay a tax for anything and buy every book we read. Pay our doctor without an insurer, pay our college professors directly for our classes, plow the roads ourselves (which is true in some parts of Idaho!), etc. Of course it's impossible for everyone to do everything for themselves. We have classes of 20 that have the same teacher, that go to school in a building paid for by a group of people. It's cheaper and easier that way. So we have a combination of systems, republics, democracies, social programs, etc. That allows for people to make their own income, but benefit from an organized system for some needs. Which is unlike communism, that mandates that everyone can only make one salary and you have no choice in which groups you can get services from. Which is a really bad thing as we all know. It's socialism used for evil and takes away agency. It was these guys that put socialism under the umbrella of a dictatorship and turned it into an ugly word.

Now looking at this through a church perspective ask yourself:

1. Do you complain when your tithing goes to help the poor members of your congregation?
2. Does your fast offering donations make others work less hard to eat, if so will you stop paying it?
3. Is it bad that Church-owned farms, ranches, canneries are controlled by Church HQ, and they control the price and production of the food they've made for its members?
4. Is it unfair that your tithing builds a temple or church for people who can't afford to buy it themselves?
5. Should missionaries pay what their mission costs in their area, instead of spreading the cost to be equal for all areas?
   
6. Is it bad that 70% of tuition for students going to church-owned schools...is paid by tithing? (okay maybe you can think of a few students who you'd like to withdraw your donation from, but you get the picture)
7. Should wealthier members of the church get a tithing break so that they can be free to spend more money in their business (if they own one) so that poorer members of the church that might be employed by them will earn more so they can spend more money in tithing and have a better life? (...if their tithing savings goes directly towards employee's salaries)

As an example of this, say that the wealthy member makes $100/year. Instead of paying $10/year they get a tithing break of paying just $8/year.

The poor member makes $10/year. They pay $1.

Now if the rich member puts all of their $2 into one poor member's salary, the poor member would now pay the church $1.20/year. And that is a very charitable wealthy guy to give away all of his new money like that.

This means even though the wealthy member was completely unselfish, the church loses $1.80, which means they have less money to help others in the church

But in reality, the poor member wouldn't get all of the $2. Instead it might be spread out to everyone in the church, each getting about 2¢, or put into savings where it earns interest and no one gets it. And we all know that you can't pay tithing on 2 cents. A policy like that would overtime drain the Church. Same goes for the tax system. Of course the Lord does a better job of taking care of people than the government, so it is worth every penny. :)

But of course we are happy to pay more tithing if the Lord blesses us with more. We want to use that to help others. That's because we are all good and charitable like that. So why do I look at it so differently when a country gives me better opportunities to earn a living, that I am stingy in sharing my increase with them? Well for lots of reasons, but this post is long already.

Note: If you answered "no" to these questions, you agree with social programs to solve some problems.

In the UK, healthcare is kind of treated like tithing. Everyone pays 11% of their income directly into the Health Fund, called the NHS. And here are the benefits everyone gets, no matter what:

1. You don't need health insurance and there are no forms to fill out or policies to read carefully or physicals proving that you don't need help with your health already.
2. Doctor's don't have to raise their rates to pay for malpractice insurance (which is usually around $250,000+ a year in the US), because the government pays the cost of lawsuits.
3. Businesses don't spend money on their employees medical benefits (so they can spend it on other things like allowing more vacation for employees—like paid maternity/paternity leave and Andrew gets 38 days a year paid vacation, which is a whole 2 months!).
4. Babies are delivered for free, even if you are a wed mother.
5. If you get cancer or need a bone marrow transplant or kidney, you don't have to put your photo on a can in Wal-Mart, because your cancer, kidney and bone marrow treatments are free.
6. Ambulances don't charge you for saving your life after some jerk crashes into you at 70 mph.
7. The thought of Life-flight doesn't give you a heart attack when you think of the charge.
8. I have the choice of 8 doctors within 2 miles of me and they are all seeing new patients. I can get an appointment within 1-4 days easily and switch doctors if I don't like mine (but mine is great). And I'm in the suburbs.
9. Doctors are rewarded financially for being better than other doctors (see pay scale here, multiply x2 to get the dollar amount), and if you are shown to be a horrible doctor that shouldn't be treating people, you are kicked out or moved to a desk job. My GP doctor earns between $160-$240K a year (and pays no malpractice insurance, office rent, equipment/supply costs, etc). Think how fast a doctor could pay off their student loans.
   
10. I can purchase private insurance and go to private hospitals and doctors instead if I wish.
11. No bottle of pills that I buy will be more than $14, ever. And if I don't like my generic pills, I can get brand pills for the same price. Here's why:

Because everyone is working together, the UK is able to put these restrictions on drug companies to lower the costs of medicine for their residents:

1. Drug companies cannot spend billions of dollars advertising your pill to generate a need from the public (there are no drug commercials on TV here).
2. Drug companies don't need to spend millions of dollars to package a product to entice doctors to use it for their patients (this means a lot coming from a graphic designer).
3. Doctors don't get paid by drug companies to give their patients more expensive medicine.
4. Drug companies eliminate billions of dollars spent on salesmen coming to the clinic to sell individual doctors on drugs and instead work with the main healthcare group directly which then sends out the information to all the doctors about your product (in fact there is a central computer system here that when a patient needs a pill the doctor has all of the choices and information about the pills that work for you right there on the screen, and if you don't like your pill you can switch if you want, you have a choice).
5. The NHS negotiates a price cap on some drugs, so that pharmaceutical companies can't increase prices simply to create bigger profits. Imagine if everyone in America said, "I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to pay more than X for your drug, so find a way to lower your spending or you won't get much business." This already happens on a small level with some insurance companies. But if everyone joined it would make more of an impact.
6. Drug companies don't spend billions of dollars to get candidates elected or bills passed to make them more money and spend a lot less money on lawyers.

In other words, make it so the drug company can't spend so much on things that don't improve your health or the medicine. Developing a drug is expensive, but spending more on marketing and lobbying for it shouldn't be something the patient has to pay for.

Okay with that being said, the NHS Health Fund is not magic. Some hospitals are better and cleaner than others. Some doctors and nurses are better than others. They charge you to use the parking lot when you get radiation treatment. Some people are complacent, some people work hard. Some love working with people, some don't.

But I really like the idea that good health isn't something that only the wealthy can afford here. So whoever gets elected, I hope they make cancer less expensive, drug companies less greedy, insurance less spendy and lawyers less busy, whether it's under the label of "socialism" or not. Because we are really behind when it comes to making sure everyone is healthy in our country and we need a maverick or someone that can fix it, because now is the time to shake things up.