How these articles impact my article in Life: The Book--
Article 1: Obama's 'Public' Health Plan Will Bankrupt the Nation by Larry Kudlow
"The president’s grandiose government-takeover-and-control strategies are going to make things worse and worse — that is, unless members of that tiny band known as the Republican party can stand on their hind legs and just say no. The Republicans must come up with some pro-competition, private-enterprise alternatives for health, energy, education, taxes, and trade that will meet the yearning of voter-taxpayers for a return to private-enterprise American prosperity and opportunity."
Of course, this embodies the opinion and tone of Kudlow's whole article, that we should be moving in the direction of privatization and deregulation towards free-enterprise and 'purer' Capitalism. However, if this does happen, then there will be a kind of free reign in all fields and research. Thus, genetic engineering and eugenics research would not be inhibited by the government at all. There would only be social pressure at most, and when ever science and research is based solely on social trends, we have seen science and research support racism, segregation, involuntary sterilization, and genocide in the past.
Article 2: A Health Reformer's Scary Diagnosis by George F. Will
"...the number of seniors living long enough to have five or more chronic conditions -- 23 percent of Medicare beneficiaries--has increased. Many of those conditions could be prevented or managed by better decisions about eating, exercising and smoking. The 20 percent of Americans who still smoke are a much larger percentage of the 23 percent who consume 67 percent of Medicare spending. Furthermore, nearly 30 percent of Medicare spending pays for care in the final year of patients' lives."
Will makes several points about health care in general, but one that applies to my article is that he has expressed that lack of patient prevention and bad hygiene and habits accounts for a lot of health care in the USA. If people just didn't smoke or ate right and exercised, it would make it a lot easier on the current government-funded health programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Now imagine if those people had genes that helped them stay skinny or athletically-inclined. What if you could engineer in genes that were from people with almost no risk of heart disease and, perhaps, even blood types (there are studies that show blood types determine effects of diet on your body) so that people could eat unhealthy foods and drinks, but still stay healthy. For a lot of people, you're only doing wrong when you get caught. Being able to enjoy all the causes and have none of the bad effects would be a definite promoting argument of genetic engineering--after all, wouldn't there be less of a need for health care after that?
Articles 3 & 4 are very convincing in getting the point across that Universal Health Coverage would simply be 'getting what we've paid for.' However, the 4th article doesn't talk about full coverage or single-payer health care, but instead addresses it from an economic viewpoint. Americans are paying money and not getting their fair share of it. Of course, in the case of genetic engineering and possible segregation due to 'access,' it seems that Hoven would not consider that a problem. They've got the money so why not let them have the advantage? Money makes money, and everything else. So people who can afford to do it shouldn't be worried about whether or not the working class hero can afford to genetically modify his offspring--it's a personal thing that you can either afford or not. Especially since in the case of designer babies it wouldn't be a necessity, the access issue would exist in the minds of many and also be disregarded as an issue by many others.
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