Another Homeschooler for Hillary
February 4th, 2008 by Trish
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Yes, I plan on voting for Hillary tomorrow. Not all homeschoolers are republicans.
I have several reasons for voting for Hillary Clinton. I think she is very experienced, quite smart, and I also happen to like her as a person. But as the campaign has moved along, I’ve actually found that the health care issue is the one that has literally made the decision for me. Read this NY Times opinion piece for a comparison of the Obama and Clinton plan to find out why.
[...] Trish at Tiny Grass: Another Homeschooler for Hillary [...]
I wasn’t all that sure about Hillary, but Trish convinced me with the universal health care argument. If we’re going to take care of people, universal health care is a must. The Republicans like to invoke the ghosts of the Soviet Union and, as usual, try to scare the crap out of people. The fact is that they want to see the profit-oriented medical landscape to continue unchecked.
Poor people - or middle class people - should not suffer through injuries or diseases that end up destroying their savings. Healthy people are much less likely to be desperate and miserable.
I am a PA (Physician Assistant). Universal Health Care (UHC) would be GREAT for my profession! With UHC, to maximize services, cost would have to be cut. Utilizing PAs instead of MDs would be a great place to start cutting after limiting medication use. But I am not sure as a citizen I would support that. I am an American first, a PA second.
I lived in Japan for 7 years (I am also a former acupuncturist/herbalist) where I enjoyed the benefits of their UHC. Their system gradually went bankrupt and they had to quickly start privatizing. Before that though, they cut the most expensive, ineffective costs — caring for the elderly. But during the decades of UHC, people felt the govt. would care for their parents so kids moved away — breaking with the old ways of living and caring for your parents and grandparents. So when old people had their medicine and nursing homes cut, they had no where to go. The kids had moved away.
Universal Health Care may sound beautiful, but it doesn’t work. Each system has its faults, we simply must choose which set of faults to live with. The present problems with Health Care costs is due to government interference with the market through medicare and industry pork. The problem is the government, not free markets.
We raise ducks, scheduled and limited our kids own vaccinations and are Buddhist. My wife loves your site and shares it with me often. She showed me this article. We both wanted Ron Paul for president (a libertarian Republican) but now we we have a very hard choice too. Why are things so complex. Our ducks live such a simple life.
I think UHC can work - I’ve spent years listening to friends in the UK go on about easily and cheaply buying medications and such. I think it would be possible if we did cut the pork significantly.
As you probably gathered from our site, Costa Rica has UHC for it’s citizens & permanent residents. It’s not perfect - it’ll take months to get a surgery - but at the same time you can go to a pharmacy and get a prescription from the pharmacist instead of seeing a doctor first.. Some of the first hand accounts I’ve heard - of both the quality of care and the humanity of the doctors - is very promising. Of course, they’ve chosen UHC instead of infrastructure repairs, but I’ll take good health over smooth roads. At the least, I would think that a faulty UHC would be an improvement over the current system ruled by profits. And I do think that a watered down, faulty UHC would be the best our government can do.
I’ve got a soft spot for Ron Paul - I like a lot of his positions. If anything, I’d like smaller government so that people and states can have more power over what they want to do (and hopefully not waste as much).
I actually had my first experience seeing a PA when I was sick last month. It was wonderful, especially in contrast to my usual interactions with doctors. The PA I saw even seemed to know some information about medications and breastfeeding, which is a miracle considering the dealings I usually have with doctors about that (ask me sometime, and I’ll tell you horror story after horror story). I would compare my experience with the PA as similar to my first experiences seeing either nurse practitioners or midwives instead of an OBGYN. Much much better. If UC increased use of PAs, I’d be all for it. Maybe somehow it’ll make homebirth more encouraged too (or am I dreaming?). Heck, that would easily save somewhere between $5K and $15K per birth.
About the Japan thing….there are so many countries that have some form of UC, so I do think it is possible for it to be successful. I’m not holding my breath that the US will be one of the successful ones, but I keep hoping. I’m a shameless idealist. I think it’s important to work for the ideal, even if you end up falling short some of the time. It doesn’t mean the ideal was wrong, or that it is impossible, but maybe that many changes take a really long time and a lot of work and mistakes to get there. And yes, there are pros and cons to each UC system. But still, it’s got to be better than where we are at with healthcare in the US right now!
Ducks are rather simple, aren’t they. I hadn’t been spending much time with mine with all the cold weather - just letting them in and out and grabbing the eggs. But then, on one of the warmer days, I took the time to stand around watching them for the first time in a long time, and wow! They made me smile and laugh and feel so good. I’m so glad they are here to remind me of the simple joys in life.