There is no such thing as “free” health care. Someone is going to pay either you through taxes, doctors/nurses/health professionals through lower salaries and longer hours, individuals through denials of services and long waits. No one works for free and doctors and nurses are not going to be slaves to the system.
No one who loves freedom would want to give power over their lives to any time of authoritarian no matter how supposedly good the ideal is. The authoritarians (socialist, communist, fascist etc) are in it for one thing – control and power over you. Power to take the minutes of your life multiplied by hundreds of millions of people to enrich themselves and their cronies.
It is critical to remember that the smallest minority is a minority of one, the individual, and treating any minority as fodder for the plans of any majority, no matter what rationales are used to justify their actions, is immoral in the extreme. Who doesn’t want everyone to be healthy and happy? Who doesn’t want everyone to have health insurance if they want it? But those are not the questions. The questions are do we want to preserve the freedom that was won in the Revolutionary War? (And secondarily, what is the best way to help people? And the answer isn’t through control and socialism).
Even a combination socialist/fascist system such as we now have – ownership of AIG etc; control over GM/Chrysler etc – is worth fighting to save and reverse the control over our lives by authoritarians in Washington. Freedom is worth fighting for and preserving.
There is nothing “civilized” about using force – under socialism, communism, or fascism – to achieve ends you can not achieve freely. Socialized medicine is not a moral ideal, it is immoral abomination. Civilization is about protecting the individual from threats of the force by others. Claiming that the United States needs to join the “civilized” world by forcing you to provide health care to me is turning the concept of civilization on its head. It is the antithesis of civilized behavior and the antithesis of the purpose of civilization.
How do you “reform” health care? Freedom. For 60+ years the Federal Government has been distorting the health insurance market and we are reaping those rewards.