Ring the alarm bells.   The AP reports the percentage of Americans with moderate to middle incomes who don't have health insurance is growing.   This is just the latest attempt to create an environment in which Americans will favor "universal health insurance coverage" or put another way, socialized medicine.   Forget about the costs.   Forget about the reduction in care most of us would experience under socialized medicine.   We need it because without it, people will forgo certain "necessary" procedures like mammograms, or won't have a regular family doctor, or worse still, folks will have problems paying their bills or might incur debt to cover the cost of medical services.

Upon real inspection, we learn that many so-called "necessary procedures" are bad cost/benefit deals at best and ineffectual at worst.   Whether mammograms do or do not do a good job of finding breast cancer is subject to debate.   But they do cost money.   Perhaps it is money well spent, perhaps it is not.   When a willing buyer of medical services makes up her own mind, efficiency is served.   But when it is assumed one must have a mammogram, the line forms and gets longer and longer.   Such is the way of socialized medicine.   Access to care falls, quality of care falls, and those waiting for procedures wait longer because they have to stand in line the way they might at a theatre when a popular movie is out.

I could tell you several anecdotes about friends whose relatives live under socialized medicine.   But I'll spare you this time.   Suffice it to say that I know of two people who died waiting months to get the type of test one might get within a week here regardless of one's insured status.   I also know of a person who died because, while her condition would have easily been treated here, the medical bureaucracy she lived under determined that she had lived long enough.   She was denied care.

So what about the "regular family doctor?"   Do you have one now?   Do you get one under socialized medicine?   The last time I had a regular family doctor who I felt comfortable with was when I was young enough to see a pediatrician.   That was long ago.   Since then, regardless of my insured status, I have seen various doctors, some regularly for years, but they do not constitute what I would call a "regular family doctor."   I've been with the same "family doctor" for about ten years.   I seldom see the MD in charge of the practice.   Most of the time the physician's assistant sees me.   He's had me on various medications for years and I always assumed the MD had been consulted.   Sometimes, on the physician's assistant's day off, I see the MD.   Once he suggested to me that I should lose some weight so he didn't have to put me on a particular medicine.   So I told him he had put me on that medication four years ago and upped the dose two years ago.   He was completely clueless about what medications his practice had prescribed for me.   Some "family doctor!"   I could get the same level of care at any clinic.

It is easy to determine that some people are uninsured and will have problems paying bills or have to incur debt to pay them.   We are a society where people incur debt to change the tires on their cars, but appliances, or even pay for the weekly groceries.   In the case of groceries, that debt is more the result of convenience than anything else.   We use credit cards to pay for our groceries but we pay those "debts" off at the end of the month.   Similarly, when I have visited doctors during times I wasn't covered by insurance, I frequently pay with a credit card - I incur debt - but I usually pay those "debts" off pretty quickly.

In America where greater and greater numbers of people are self-employed, the decision of whether or not to get insurance coverage is a rational one.   In my decades of being under someone else's employ, I always had coverage.   It came with the job.   Since I have been self-employed, I get the same coverage because my family is unaccustomed to living without it.   But there are two kinds of coverage.   One kind provides insurance against catastrophic health problems which would bankrupt a millionaire.   The other kind takes care of the routine types of visits.   But if I took an average of medical bills over several years and evaluated the cost of the care with no insurance vs. the cost of care plus the cost of insurance, it would be a mistake to be insured.   So many rational Americans are making a rational decision to go without health insurance.   That should come as no surprise.   And that's a major part of what this study covered by the AP has discovered.   It just isn't spun that way because it does not serve the liberal agenda.