SOCIAL SECURITY:
Treating Symptoms
Or
Curing Patients
Imagine a woman feeling pain and discomfort in her throat. She goes to her local doctor, who upon examination discovers an unusual lump in her throat. That doctor refers her to a specialist, who performs a biopsy on the lump. The resulting test shows the lump to be malignant. Upon relating the test results to the patient, the specialist then advises the woman to take two Tylenol™ and spray Chloraseptic™ on her throat to ease any discomfort she feels when she tries to swallow. This ends the treatment of the patient.
In this scenario, no reasonable person would agree that the treatment of the woman’s condition was appropriate. In fact, the vast majority of reasonable people – including those who believe society has become too litigious – would probably agree that the woman should immediately file a malpractice suit against the specialist and seek to have that quack’s license revoked, if only to prevent that specialist from doing any harm to other patients.
The reason? It is obvious in the above scenario that the doctor incorrectly treated the patient’s symptoms instead of the cause of the symptoms. Moreover, this mistake was especially egregious since the specialist knew the cause of the symptoms, yet ignored the cause and treated only the symptoms. Which brings up the topic of Social Security.
The current system under which Social Security and Medicare (OASDHI) is funded has been the subject of great controversy over the past few years. However, like the specialist above, the vast majority of politicians – both Democrat and Republican – in Washington only seem interested in trea ...