A federal
judge in Texas recently ruled that Obamacare is unconstitutional due to its
mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance, and the Trump
administration has decided not to defend the law, reigniting the “repeal and
replace” battle lost by the Republicans following Trump’s election. Speaking on the decision not to defend the
law, Trump has declared that Republicans will become “the party of healthcare,”
and while I am shaking my head in dismay, Barack Obama must be smiling to
himself, because he knows that even if Democrats lose the battle over Obamacare,
they will have won the war to make the federal government (and therefore
taxpayers) ultimately responsible for healthcare.
Obamacare
was nothing more than a wealth-transfer scheme in which taxpayers were forced
to subsidize health insurance for people who supposedly couldn’t afford it on
their own. I say supposedly because whether
or not someone can “afford” something is a complicated question that requires a
study of what choices they’ve made in life, and an assessment of whether or not
they’re doing anything and everything they should be doing to assume full
responsibility for themselves and their families. Nothing like that happens in Obamacare or in
any welfare program run by the geniuses managing our federal government. The war fought by Obama and Democrats wasn’t
over Obamacare, per se. It was over whether
it is the proper role of the federal government to ensure that all Americans
have healthcare. I am not 100% clear on
what Trump means when he says Republicans will be “the party of healthcare,” but
it’s difficult to see how that label restores the power of the people to be
free of the federal government’s interference in our healthcare and in our
wallets.
I’ve written
on this subject so many times that I feel like a broken record. The only
role the federal government legitimately has with respect to health insurance
and healthcare is to ensure a free and fair marketplace. To that end we should be pursuing tort reform,
reducing the regulatory burden and paperwork mandates associated with
healthcare, getting rid of barriers to competition and legislating transparency
in healthcare pricing. The federal
government made sure that we know how many calories are in that cheeseburger we
just ordered, but good luck finding out how many thousands of dollars that
surgery is going to cost you. A friend
of mine was recently injured when her car was rear-ended. Her medical bills are now close to $300,000
and she’s not done with her treatment.
Everyone, myself included, has a story about the outrageous medical bill
they received for something. Democrats
and Obamacare did NOTHING to address the immoral scam that has become our
health industry. Instead they just found
a way to pass the bill to someone else – hard-working, tax-paying strangers who
have zero control over the health habits of the people they’ve been forced to
subsidize. That’s not only wrong, it
continues our slide towards economic suicide.
If we could only have the good sense to take the steps that would
restore rational, competitive pricing to healthcare, then it wouldn’t seem so
crazy to make every capable citizen responsible for paying his own bills. What a novel idea, eh?
We MUST have
the fight in this country to restore the Constitution and the limits of the
federal government to use its citizens as a credit card. Only when that happens is there any hope of
Making America Great Again. Good luck to
us.
~CW
The post can also be viewed at the blog site The Pesky Truth.
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