Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

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For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand

15 September 2009

The Evil Core of ObamaCare

What are the minimal elements that ObamaCare will settle for? ObamaCare will at least require that:
  • There is a personal mandate requiring the purchase of government qualified health insurance.
  • The young, those with healthy lifestyles, and the healthy must be in the same insurance pool as the older, the unhealthy, and those with unhealthy lifestyles.
  • Those who cannot begin to afford the resulting health insurance policies will receive a subsidy.
  • The lowest income group will be added to Medicaid.
If there is no "government option" or no "government promoted and controlled co-op" component in the plan, this is good, but these are actually secondary issues. The primary issues are those bulleted above. These four components to the plan will do huge destruction to our economy, to our health care industry all by themselves, and to our individual rights.

The first two items deprive each individual of any choice on how to spend his income and subject those least in need of health insurance to very much more expensive health insurance than they can now purchase as they subsidize others. The young, who may be paying off student loans and trying to find the money to buy a home, will be hit especially hard. Of course, many of the young deserve this since so many voted for the chief socialist community activist scoundrel BO. The first bullet also allows the government to determine what medical services are covered by a qualified insurance plan, which allows them to greatly increase its cost and to buy votes from many who offer those medical services. The second bullet removes all financial incentives for trying to live a healthy lifestyle.

The third and fourth bullets insure that government will spend huge sums of taxpayer money subsidizing the health care of large additional numbers of Americans. This insures that the government will have to dictate prices for medical practices to keep from smashing the piggy bank into a fine powder. As it is, Medicare has unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years which are said to be $30 trillion. History tells us the unfunded liabilities will be much greater than those now estimated. The government will have to make difficult rationing choices respecting health care because of this. This means that bureaucrats will indeed be standing resolutely between patients and their doctors.

The doctors will be treated with no respect and they and hospitals will be unable to find any other segment of American society to provide them enough income that the most able peope will want to become doctors. At the present time, the privately insured have to pay higher rates for medical services than the government pays for people in Medicare or Medicaid. This pool of sacrificial privately insured individuals will no longer be available to pick up the tab, so the costs which will have to picked up by the government will rise rapidly. Some combination of the young and healthy, of the general taxpayer, inflation, and in new taxes will have to pay the nation's health bill.

Many more people will be wanting more medical care, which was going to be a problem in any case due to the aging of the Baby Boomers. Now underpaid doctors and nurses who are treated like slaves will have to carry a heavier load. Soon, fewer and fewer intelligent people will want to become doctors, so the workload for those available doctors will be huge. Very long waits for medical treatment will ensue. Equipment will become more and more obsolete also.

And, the government will have a very tight noose about the entire health care industry and the bodies of each and every American. The right to life will be eviscerated. Each of our lives will be in the hands of a socialist bureaucrat.

A minimal ObamaCare health insurance reform plan has all the essential evil ingredients. Any health insurance reform plan suitable to these socialist thieves must be defeated. If it is not, the loss to Americans is most frightening to imagine.

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