My letter to the Congressman on Obamacare

Dear Congressman,

I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to vote against government healthcare. This “free” healthcare will cost the taxpayers, the very people you want to help, in taxes and higher prices of virtually everything more than they could possibly spend on any private health insurance. And this “free” healthcare is going to be of a much worse quality. Government healthcare doesn’t work. It’s more expensive and less efficient. It takes a choice away from people. It is immoral, because it enslaves the doctors and impoverishes people who could otherwise find a better use for their money. It is immoral and it is unconstitutional. In order to provide this “free” healthcare you will have to rob us, people, of everything we still have left. Please, stop this madness!

I am originally from Russia, and Russia, as you know, has a government-run healthcare. Here are a few ideas of what it looks like:

The shabbiness of Russian policlinics and hospitals can horrify any American who sees them for the first time. Doctors, always underpaid, couldn't care less about their patients. Misdiagnosis is something absolutely common. They can be treating you for one disease till you die from another.

80% of medical negligence cases are never won. In fact, if somebody manages to win a case against negligent doctors and get some compensation (you are lucky if it's about a thousand dollars) it'll be all over the news.

There have been numerous cases through the years where babies and little children were infected with AIDS at hospitals during blood transfusions. Doctors don't always bother to check a donor’s blood for diseases. In some cases the number of infected children reached over 150.

If you are an old person (and old in Russia starts at 50-60) you get less and less attention from the doctors. If you are 80-90 and need an ambulance they may never even bother to come to your call, after all you've already lived too long.

Women are often afraid to get pregnant, because pregnant women seem to be treated worse than anybody else. My mother was made to walk to the delivery room when her water had already broken and her baby was half way out. A nurse or a doctor can yell at you if you are doing something wrong as if you are a whore and not an expectant young mother. Imagine the psychological stress especially for a first time mother who is already scared without any additional “help” from the doctors. Many babies are born with chronic conditions and their mothers get chronic diseases for the rest of their lives due to the doctors' negligence.

In my home town there is a practice now for young women as soon as they get pregnant to visit a certain doctor and pay him an advance to make sure that he helps them through the pregnancy and is personally present during the delivery, after which he gets the rest of the money. If you don't want to pay this bribe, blame yourself, your baby will be pulled out by an indifferent nurse. If they tear you apart in the process, it's your problem.

I heard of a case where a future father, when he saw the way his pregnant wife was treated, pulled out a gun and stuck it in the doctor’s mouth and promised that he'd pull the trigger if anything happened to his wife. The doctor did his best, of course, but not many women are lucky to have such protectors.

If you or your relative were in the hospital for any problem you would need to be prepared with bribe and present money. Small tips, chocolates, etc. for the nurses and bigger tips for the doctors. Plus you’d have to roam the drugstores in search of medications they’d tell you to buy, because they won’t have any.

If you were to go to your physical exam you’d have bring your own sterile latex gloves and your own gown if you care about your safety and cleanliness.

One good thing is that people don’t have to go to the doctor to get a prescription to buy a drug. You can buy anything in the drug store without a prescription, starting from antibiotics and birth control and ending with Viagra. For that reason people try to avoid doctors as much as they can and rely heavily on self-diagnosis and self treatment. I am sure it kills a lot of people too, but many people would rather die on their own than deal with doctors.

Do you need a transplant? Keep dreaming, for most people it’s absolutely out of reach. The waiting lines are so long that you might as well give up hope.

There are a few private clinics, of course, but they are absolutely unaffordable for about 90% of the population. And very few cities actually even have them.

If you want to imagine going to a doctor under socialized medicine imagine going to the DMV or a post office. The waiting time and the attitude are exactly the same. The only difference is that a driver’s license or a postage stamp are not the same as your kidneys or your heart or your liver.

Of course, you may say that Russia is not Canada or France or Great Britain because things are so much worse in Russia. Things are worse in Russia, but Russia is the ultimate example of what Canada or Great Britain or France or the USA can become when the governments of these countries run out of other people’s money and run out of people who care.

Trusting your heart or your brain to a doctor, enslaved in the socialized healthcare system is the same as committing a suicide. They simply don’t care, because they don’t have to compete, because there are very few doctors who want to work under that kind of system. You might as well go to a butcher to have your brain surgery. Or maybe you are hoping that you and your family will be spared. I am sure you won’t have to wait in endless lines for basic medical procedures. You’ll still be able to afford private healthcare unlike 90% of the Americans who will be forced to use public doctors because their money has been stolen from them to support those very public doctors, and they won’t be able to afford anything private anymore.

Please, stop this public healthcare plan! Please, use your reason. You must have some consciousness left to keep you from participating in the destruction of this country and the people who voted for you!