Dr. Milton Wolf at AFP Kansas summit

on

At the Kansas Defending the American Dream Summit 2010, produced by Americans for Prosperity-Kansas, Dr. Milton Wolf addressed the crowd on health care issues. Wolf is a physician and second cousin to President Barack Obama.

“Three months ago I had never been to a political rally,” he told the audience. He started a website — The Wolf Files — and became involved.

He told the audience of some of the personal attacks he’s received.

“Freedom isn’t free, and liberty cannot be a spectator sport.” The government takeover of health care is really a cover for an assault on our freedom, he told the audience. Deep in the thousands of pages of the bill is health care rationing, which its supporters claim is not the purpose of the bill.

Wolf said that by coming between citizens and their doctors, there is no other part of life that regulators can’t touch.

Donald Berwick, the head of Medicare, says that there will be rationing. He compliments the British health care system, but doesn’t talk about the results. Wolf said that the results for cancer survivability in Great Britain are much worse than in the United States.

He said that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius received a report from her own agency that said health costs will rise after government reform, but that she withheld release of the report until after Congress voted.

There are free market solutions for health care. First, get the government out of the patient exam room. Government should not be regulating who get mammograms.

Second, make health care insurance companies answerable to consumers, not their employers. Where free markets are allowed to work in medicine, such as laser eye surgery, the costs have come down tremendously.

Third, eliminate junk lawsuits. From $100 billion to $200 billion is spent each year on defensive medicine, he said. He mentioned a novel concept: health care dollars get spent on health care, not lawyers.