Health Care and Government
James Madison, Federalist Papers #45
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.”
U.S. Constitution, 10th Amendment
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Constitution Party opposes the governmentalization and bureaucratization of American medicine. Government regulation and subsidy constitutes a threat to both the quality and availability of patient-oriented health care and treatment.
Hospitals, doctors and other health care providers should be accountable to patients - not to politicians, insurance bureaucrats, or HMO Administrators.
If the supply of medical care is controlled by the federal government, then officers of that government will determine which demand is satisfied. The result will be the rationing of services, higher costs, poorer results - and the power of life and death transferred from caring physicians to unaccountable political overseers.
We denounce any civil government entity’s using age or any other personal characteristic to: preclude people and insurance firms from freely contracting for medical coverage; conscript such people into socialized medicine, e.g., Medicare; or prohibit these people from using insurance payments and/or their own money to obtain medical services in addition to, or to augment the quality of, those services prescribed by the program.
We applaud proposals for employee-controlled "family coverage" health insurance plans based on cash value life insurance principles.
The federal government has no Constitutional provision to regulate or restrict the freedom of the people to have access to medical care, supplies or treatments. We advocate, therefore, the elimination of the federal Food and Drug Administration, as it has been the federal agency primarily responsible for prohibiting beneficial products, treatments and technologies here in the United States that are freely available in much of the rest of the civilized world.
We affirm freedom of choice of practitioner and treatment for all citizens for their health care.
We support the right of patients to seek redress of their grievances through the courts against insurers and/or HMO's.
We condemn the misrepresentations made by the Federal Administration in securing passage of the recently enacted Medicare prescription drug bill and the use of such legislation to secure government subsidies to special interests such as the HMOs, and to protect the artificially high cost to consumers of prescription drugs.
