 |
Free Market Healthcare |
 |
NOT Free Market Healthcare |
Any questions?
Can you
imagine what it would be like if Republican politicians were put in charge of
removing a stubborn Band-Aid from a child’s arm?
Republican
#1: “We can’t just rip off the
Band-Aid! It’s going to hurt and then
her parents will be mad and our approval ratings will go down!
Republican
#2: “What if we brought in the finest
surgeons (at taxpayers’ expense) to surgically remove her arm, rip off the
Band-Aid, and then reattach the arm?”
Republican
#3: “That’s crazy! Let’s just bring in a team of
anesthesiologists (at taxpayers’ expense) to sedate the child, then rip off the
Band-Aid while she’s sleeping.”
Republican
#4: “Or we could hire a circus (at
taxpayers’ expense) to distract her while we rip the Band-Aid off!”
After
recently postponing a vote on the Republican healthcare bill, Senate leader
Mitch McConnell said, “This is a very complicated subject.”
I suppose it
is complicated, but that’s in no small part because Republicans have
exacerbated the problem with their foolish and misguided efforts to “fix” the
Obamacare mess with the impossible, self-imposed condition of not upsetting
anyone. Furthermore, if not upsetting
anyone is the goal, they’re failing miserably.
And apparently if anyone IS to be upset it can’t be the freeloaders who
should be paying for their own healthcare, the insurance companies who
conspired with Obama or the medical industry that profits so handsomely by
gaming the system. No, as always it must
be middleclass taxpayers, most of whom already provide for their own insurance,
who take the fall because these are the folks who can be depended upon to
re-elect the same Republicans that keep failing them. This is the insanity that is our Party.
The Supreme
Court’s traitorous ruling notwithstanding, the federal government has no
business involving itself in the healthcare of American citizens. I know this in my heart and in my brain to
be a fundamental and inarguable truth, because the evidence speaks for
itself. Just look at the mess that’s
been made with respect to both our healthcare “system” (more on that later),
the infinitely spiraling costs and the take-no-prisoners fighting that consumes
both bodies of congress as they battle on behalf of their constituencies. You don’t need to be an expert on the
Constitution or on the Founding Fathers to see that this chaos and violation of
our liberties is not the product of their design. This is what the Constitution was supposed
to protect us from. As long as the
federal government insists on inserting itself where it doesn’t belong and
assuming powers that the Constitution does not expressly assign to it, chaos
will always be just an election away, if not the everyday norm. That is the principled, moral argument for
repealing Obamacare. It was wrong from
the get go, therefore it must be undone.
But since so many Republicans no longer care about what is right or
wrong according to the Constitution, I’ll make the practical argument as well.
The first
problem with the “healthcare system” in the U.S. is that it was never supposed
to be a “system.” “System” implies central planning, purposeful design and
continuous regulation with the goal of producing a defined outcome. None of this has historically been applicable
to healthcare in the U.S. which, aside from the unique and polluting
involvement of the insurance industry (more on that later), should be like any
other consumer product bought and sold in the free market. But the Left understands that a clever lie
repeated often enough becomes the truth, and their nagging insistence, year
after year, that the “healthcare system is broken” has turned myth into reality
in a classic case of the tail wagging the dog.
How can the system be “broken” if the system doesn’t exist? It was a slight of hand that enabled the
federal government to justify meddling in something that the Constitution gives
it no power to meddle in. To whatever
extent a U.S. “healthcare system” exists, it is not by design but by deceit and
default.
One of the
reasons Republicans are having so much trouble trying to cut and paste a bill
that “fixes” healthcare, besides the fact that it’s outside the scope of
authority of the federal government, is because they want to give voters the
benefits of a free market without the negatives of a free market. Insurance is supposed to be something you buy
in case you get sick, not after you get sick.
That’s what makes it insurance. A
free market requires that you make trade-offs and sacrifices and establish
priorities in your life. Consequences,
good and bad, are a necessary element of the free market system. And here’s the really big rub: Neither Obamacare nor the patchwork “fix”
cobbled together by Republicans will “fix” healthcare because it does nothing
to lower the real cost. U.S. Healthcare
costs are comparatively high due to:
Administrative
costs
Defensive
medicine costs
Drug costs
Impediments
to competition in the market
Absence of a
true consumer-producer relationship
That last
one’s a biggie. The educated consumer is
a key factor to making products and services affordable, and yet it’s nearly
impossible for the average person to be an informed and discerning consumer in
a market dictated by deals between insurance companies and medical
providers. If congress really wants to
meddle in something, paving the way to transparency and consistency in medical
pricing would be a good start. Defensive
medicine costs and impediments to cross-state competition are also areas where
congress could help the free market, if they would only do it instead of just
talking about it.
Our reliance
upon insurance companies who act as the middleman in nearly every
doctor-patient transaction also inflates the cost of healthcare. Insurance was originally designed to protect
consumers from large and often unexpected healthcare costs. Now it’s more of a payment processing system
for everything from ingrown toenails on up, which means your doctor has to hire
more staff to interface with insurance companies.
Finally, one
in every five Americans gets their health care through Medicaid.1 This is an outrageous and inexcusable breach
of congress’s fiduciary obligation to American taxpayers. The vast majority of Medicaid recipients
could be and should be paying for their own healthcare, which they might
actually be able to do if our merry meddlers in the federal government would
ever focus their efforts on reducing the cost of medical services and insurance
rather than simply transferring the cost from one person to another.
In sum
Republicans aren’t doing themselves or the American people any favors by making
the repeal of Obamacare so complicated.
This is the ideal time, with their approval ratings already low and
expectations waning, to go bold and rip that Band-Aid off as quickly and
cleanly as they can. Let this be the
congress that helps restore the Constitution rather than helping to kill it.
~CW
To comment on this post please visit The Pesky Truth where it is reposted. I am unable to respond to comments on Blogger. Thanks!
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete