Healthcare-For-Clunkers.
The latest House proposal for nationalizing health care via a “federal option” is almost a whopping 2,000 pages long. They plan to vote as early as next week. Do you reaaally think our representatives are going to bother to read this monstrosity? Rep. John Boehner justifiably called it “1,900 pages of bureaucracy.” So, the complications they’ve created from our tax code they wish to further extend to our healthcare.
For a moment, put aside the notion that your government will for the first time ever legislatively force its citizens to purchase something (health care) regardless of individual choice, liberty or freedom (through the oft-abused interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, which is further subject to interpretation via the whims of nine unelected judges).
Consider other recent government ‘well-intended’ programs that simply robbed Peter to pay Paul. Today it was reported that the CARS program, also called Cash-For-Clunkers, cost the taxpayer a whopping $24,000 per vehicle. Whether aimed at “reforming” health care or another sector of the economy, such logic is simply a revision of genius economist Frédéric Bastiat famous essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” in which he retorts that era’s misguided logic that somehow a child who breaks the shopkeepers window is good for the economy. Bastiat did not have a high confidence or impression of “progressives.”
[Bastiat 1:116] The socialists who have invented these follies, and who in days of distress plant them in the minds of the masses, generously confer on themselves the title of “forward-looking” men, and there is a real danger that usage, that tyrant of language, will ratify both the word and the judgment it implies. “Forward-looking” assumes that these gentlemen can see ahead much further than ordinary people; that their only fault is to be too much in advance of their century; and that, if the time has not yet arrived when certain private services, allegedly parasitical, can be eliminated, the fault is with the public, which is far behind socialism. To my mind and knowledge, it is the contrary that is true, and I do not know to what barbaric century we should have to return to find on this point a level of understanding comparable to that of the socialists.
The modern socialist factions ceaselessly oppose free association in present-day society. They do not realize that a free society is a true association much superior to any of those that they concoct out of their fertile imaginations.
In short, these elitist Capital Hill bureaucrats and soon to be health care panel experts think they know better than the mass of we public citizens. Just shut up and swallow your medicine, they know what’s best for you.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of free-market reforms worth at least attempting prior to the foolish nationalization of such a massive chunk of our economy:
1) Eliminate wasteful lawsuits via tort reform or loser pay rules.
2) Equalize the tax code by allowing individuals to deduct the cost of health insurance as businesses can today.
3) Provide incentives and tax breaks through wellness programs.
4) Allow health insurance companies to compete across state lines.
Imagine that. And it didn’t take 1,900 pages from Congress.
Do yourself a favor and contact your Congressional reps with such demands.