Loren Clark-Moe Should Demand that Government Stop Restricting Women’s Reproductive Financing Choices

Loren Clark-Moe, a former analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, complained recently in a Washington Post op-ed that her former employer’s health insurance didn’t cover a $480.00 abortion she had while employed there, because the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program is legally barred by Congress from covering abortions except in the case of rape or incest.

Citing “increasing attempts across the United States to limit women’s access to reproductive health care,” including the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, Clark-Moe railed against “special laws that restricted my reproductive choices.”

But exactly how are women’s reproductive choices restricted if their employers, whether government or private, don’t cover abortions? Their choices—i.e., their reproductive rights—are not restricted, of course. There is no right to “choose” to make others pay for one’s reproductive choices. An employee is free to pay out-of-pocket for uncovered procedures, as Clark-Moe did with her abortion.

Having said that, Clark-Moe is right that laws restrict her choices, but not in the sense she means. The question to ask is: How in the world did employers come to have so much control over employees’ health insurance to begin with? The answer is simple; government interference into the health insurance market, without which the whole issue surrounding the Hobby Lobby case would be moot.

The government interferes in health insurance in numerous ways. Employer-based, or third-party-payer, health insurance is one consequence of this interference that directly impacts the issue Clark-Moe raises. Decades ago, the government tied health insurance to employment through discriminatory tax policies that favor employer-provided over individually owned insurance, in effect giving employers inordinate control over employees’ health insurance—and restricting women’s reproductive financing choices.

So ingrained is third-party-payer that most Americans take it as axiomatic that someone else must provide health insurance. We then ressent and complain when something we expect not to have to pay for isn’t covered. So, like Clark-Moe, we target our resentment at the employer. But, rather than direct her ire at employers, her beef should be with the government.

Actually, the government restricts our health insurance choices in two major ways; employer-based health insurance, also known as third-party-payer, and benefit mandates.

Eliminating the tax discrimination favoring employer-based insurance by extending equal tax treatment to individuals would incentivize employers to establish tax-free individual employee health savings accounts (HSAs), funded by money the employer now spends on company health coverage—an incentive most employers would probably welcome. (Remember that employer health insurance is part of the employee’s compensation, which makes the money the employer spends the employee’s. HSAs simply gives employees control over their own money.)

Through HSAs, our ability to own and control our own health insurance could be restored. A similar phenomenon occurred when Congress expanded individuals’ pre-tax retirement options like Individual Retirement accounts (IRAs) and 401ks. Employers began phasing out defined-benefit pensions controlled by employers, and began contributions to the individual accounts owned and controlled (to the extent the law allows) by employees.

Absent discriminatory tax policies, Clark-Moe and Hobby Lobby’s employees would own their health insurance, as they do their life, homeowners, and auto insurance, and be free to purchase abortifacient coverage without worrying about Supreme Court rulings or Congressional political maneuverings. (Of course, an employer may still choose to offer company group plans. But such plans would likely go the way of the defined-benefit pension. What employer really wants to have the responsibility of managing employees’ health insurance.) HSAs would also solve a serious, related third-party-payer problem—pre-existing conditions.

Third-party-payer is not the only problem with health insurance; e.g., benefit mandates force us to buy coverage we may not need, want, or can afford, and drive up insurance premiums. This, too, restricts our health insurance choices. (For an in-depth examination of the problems caused by government interference in the health insurance market, and some moral, rights-respecting, free-market solutions, see Paul Hsieh’s call to Legalize Real Health Insurance in Forbes.)

Employers that provide health insurance have a right to decide what health expenses to cover. But, rather than violate employers’ rights, we should demand that government stop restricting our individual health insurance choices. We should demand that legislators enact whatever tax law and other legal changes are required to eliminate government-instigated third-party-payer insurance, eliminate all insurance mandates, and put healthcare consumers in charge of their own insurance. These simple reforms would protect employer and employee rights alike, start America on the road to free market health insurance, and make Hobby Lobby-like conflicts between employers and employees wholly unnecessary.

Related:

SCOTUS Hobby Lobby Decision Skirts the Fundamental Issue

The Healthcare Alternative: Government Planning vs. Individual Planning

Government Intervention, not the Health Insurance Industry," "Ruined the System"

Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care”—Paul Hsieh

Real vs. Our Pseudo Health Insurance

Dr. Beth Haynes has a great piece over at The Huffington Post titled Almost All Americans Lack Health Insurance. Haynes addresses an often side-stepped question relating to the healthcare debate: What, exactly, is health insurance? It's an important question, and as the title states, few of us have real health insurance.

Real insurance, she notes, "is designed as a means to pay for unexpected, unpredictable, very expensive occurrences outside of the control of the policyholder." That is not what our current, government controlled health insurance does. Instead, "insurance" covers myriad routine expenses that would never be included in properly structured insurance.

This state of affairs has destructive consequences for our healthcare. Haynes explains:

Thanks to this quirk, when we are at our most vulnerable, we are less protected. The bottom line: Our premium dollars will only cover so much. Requiring first-dollar coverage for predictable, relatively affordable expenses leaves fewer funds available to cover truly catastrophic events. And that means "insurance" companies are forced into skimping on items that could and most likely would be covered by real insurance. This trend is severely eroding our ability to protect ourselves from medical disasters.

Haynes goes on to cite a specific example of this aspect in practice; premature infant care. She provides evidence to show how insurers and doctors are increasingly pressured to skimp on expensive "preemie" care in order to have the money to cover mandated routine expenses like normal births and well-child checks. 

I left these comments:

The reference to premature infants is very personal to me.

My granddaughter Madeline was born at 25 weeks. She spent the first 2-1/2 months in a hospital NICU, followed by in-home care for a period. The insurance company paid what they were contractually obligated to pay, which ran into the six figures. My daughter and son-in-law paid only about $4000 out of pocket. That's what insurance is for.

Yet, under any government controlled, central planning schemes like ObamaCare, "premies" like Madeline, now a healthy 10-year-old, will be killed off by "cost effectiveness" death panels (except for those born to the very rich); so that others can get "free" annual checkups, birth control, flu shots, or teeth cleanings.

Great article!

In answer to StillRockin77, who  wrote:

“Until we eliminate private health insurance companies from the equation, we will NEVER have an effective health care system in this country. PERIOD.”

I replied:

StillRockin77; People have a fundamental right to organize insurance companies and sell policies to willing buyers. It's called freedom of contract, a form of voluntary association. Anyone who disapproves of private insurance is free not to purchase private insurance. No one has a moral right to forbid other consumers and the company from voluntarily contracting.

When you say that "we" should "eliminate private health insurance companies," you are advocating dictatorship.

As Paul Hsieh notes over at FIRM, "Instead of genuine insurance, we are moving towards a system of bad pre-paid care."

Government, Not Industry, is the Predator in Health Insurance

The New Jersey Star-Ledger followed up NJ Representative Tom MacArthur’s ruckus town hall meeting by ridiculing MacArthur for comparing the fears about the GOP taking away the guarantee of pre-existing condition coverage with the earlier fears about “Death Panels” under ObamaCare.

At his town hall meeting, MacArthur said:

"I think it speaks to the people's fear, but it reminds me a bit, people were saying President Obama wanted to set up death panels, wanted old people to die," he said. "You look back now and you realize how insane people got with their fear and their anger."

In Memo to Tom MacArthur: You are the source of fear, not death panels, the Star-Ledger said:

The maestro of the Obamacare repeal now says that he was referring to common "scare-tactics" used to "drum up fear," but nothing is more alarming than miscuing the national reaction to the resurrection of this fetid corpse known as the American Health Care Act.

MacArthur doesn't seem to remember: Sarah Palin and her acolytes used "death panel" to spread a lie - refuted in every advanced culture - that government involvement in health care means rationing and death.

The fear he witnessed Wednesday night is based on the fact that federal involvement in health care is a necessity, because it ensures that nobody is left out or exploited by a predatory industry - just the opposite of a death panel, you might say. [emphasis added]

It’s that last paragraph that got my attention. So, I left these comments:

This is exactly backward. It is the government that has a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. Only the government, through its unique law-making powers, can force you to comply with its edicts under threat of throwing you in a cage. It is only the government that, through its power to take your money at gunpoint—its taxing powers—can force us into an employer-based system of health insurance, so if you lose your job you lose your insurance—thus getting a lot of people stuck with a “pre-existing condition” through no fault of their own. It is only the government that can force up our insurance premiums through “essential benefit” mandates that we otherwise wouldn’t buy. It is the government that forcibly bans insurance companies from competing, to the detriment of consumers. It is the government that forcibly forbids health insurance companies from performing the essential task at the heart of the purpose of insurance—to fairly price policies according to an objective assessment of risk. Only a government can force you to buy health insurance only government central planners approve of. Only a government can forcibly take money from some people to subsidize others it deems “left out.”

Industry cannot do any of that. It cannot force anyone to buy its product. A private company can only make offers. Consumers are free to accept the offer, attempt to negotiate better terms, or reject it and go to a competitor (if the market is free from government interference). Consumers are free to say to a private company what they are not free to say to the government—“NO.”

The fact is, the current health insurance industry is not a real insurance industry. The government has gone way beyond its only morally proper function of using its legal monopoly on the use of force to protect individual rights through, for example, policing the insurance markets against fraud, breach of contract, and the like. After decades of increasing government controls, all imposed at the point of a gun, seemingly “private” health “insurance” has essentially become an arm of socialistic government coercion and forced redistribution. Through myriad interventions engineered by politicians who never concern themselves with unintended consequences or the rights of their constituents to make their own choices based on the own judgement according to their own personal circumstances and interests, the government has caused all of the problems we now demand government fix. American health insurance is a victim of predation, all right—a predatory government.

Federal involvement in health care is not only not a necessity—it is destructive of real health insurance that people can actually use to fulfil their personal moral responsibility of paying and managing their own way on healthcare. The problems of government interference in healthcare go beyond private health insurance. But on the ACA vs.AHCA debate, my view is that we must step back and acknowledge that government control of health insurance has had its chance and it has failed. It’s time to return power to the people—the power of freedom and individual rights that only free market reforms can achieve. Unfortunately, the GOP’s AHCA tinkers, but it really is only a form of ObamaCare without Obama.  

Related Reading:

Is ObamaCare Socialist? No, . . . and Yes: But Who Cares?

Replacing ObamaCare Should Mean Replacing Government Planning With Individual Planning

THE OBAMACARE ALTERNATIVE OBAMA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT—Rituparna Basu

Government Intervention, not the Health Insurance Industry, "Ruined the System"Moral

Health Care vs. Universal Health Care, by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh

Christie’s Insurance Mandate is a ‘Teachable Moment’

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wants to tackle opioid drug addiction in his last year in office (He’s term-limited from running for a third term). Opioids are most commonly used for prescription pain relief. How will he do it? Another statist program. In Christie, lawmakers moving fast on aggressive bill to tackle N.J. addiction crisis, Susan K. Livio reported for the NJ.com in late January, 2017:

Far-reaching legislation Gov. Chris Christie outlined in his State of the State address that would prevent opioid addiction and reduce economic barriers to inpatient drug treatment is expected to get a hearing as early as next week, one of the prime sponsors of the bill confirmed late Monday.

Though still in the draft stage, the aggressive bill requires insurance companies to admit addicts without delay into an inpatient treatment program regardless of their ability to pay, for a maximum of six months, according to Senate Health Committee Chairman Joseph Vitale (D-Middlesex), one of bill's prime sponsors.

The bill includes the following:

• insurance companies to provide up to 28 days of doctor-recommended inpatient or outpatient treatment without prior authorization;
• Insurance companies to decide whether inpatient or outpatient care in excess of 28 days is required before the initial 28-day period expires. The patient may file an appeal if denied an extension.
• Patients to pay no more than what their insurance policy requires in deductible costs, co-pays and co-insurance;
• Insurance companies to cover medication-assisted treatments - a growing category of drugs that block the body's addiction;
• Doctors to write an initial prescription of no more than five days of opioids for pain;
• Doctors discuss the danger of opioid addiction with the patient, or the minor patient's parent or guardian.

As we can see, the bill also includes more regulations on doctors, thus interfering further on doctor-patient relationships.

It's a teachable moment! If you want a lesson in why health insurance premiums are soaring, just look at this bill—more mandates on private insurers.

These drug treatment mandates will force insurers to raise general premiums further. This is great cover for the socialist politicians. By the time individuals and businesses see the premium increases, everyone will have forgotten about Christie’s bill to outlaw health insurance policies that don’t include the coverage politicians demand. The insurers get vilified. The politicians escape blame.

Make no mistake. Insurance benefit mandates are forced government redistribution of wealth—only less honest and transparent than direct handouts financed by direct taxes. Western politicians long ago realized that you can get socialism without nationalization by forcing private enterprise to be a conduit for socialist policies. It is called fascism, which is socialism with a private veneer. It’s a great gimmick. After premiums rise to finance the drug treatment mandates, the politicians can then blame “greedy” insurance companies, and then demand more ObamaCare or TrumpCare or WhateverCare subsidies to “help” insure people their own mandates helped price out of the market—either that, or demand single-payer government control to replace the "failed" market.

How about a little truth and transparency from politicians, for a change? Government-enforced wealth redistribution is immoral and unconstitutional. Health insurance benefit mandates are just that. But if we’re going to have them anyway, let’s at least demand that our politicians do it openly, so we know exactly how much our pockets are being picked to pay for them. If the politicians want to pay for drug treatment, pay directly with government checks and then tell us exactly how much we will be taxed to fund it rather than dishonestly burying the costs in our health insurance premiums.

Related Reading:

Real vs. Our Pseudo Health Insurance

Autism Mandates Vs. a Free Market

Autism Treatment and Government Insurance Mandates

Almost All Americans Lack Health Insurance—Beth Haynes, M.D.

The Only Obamacare Fix Is For Obama To Legalize Real Health Insurance—Paul Hsieh

The Firefighter, the Arsonist

As we await the outcome of the ObamaCare vote in the House of Representatives, which now appears to have come back from the dead, I thought I might post an update on some of my recent activism in the health care debate.

I posted rebuttal comments on three recent op-eds. My responses are
published below following a brief description of the articles. The responses have some redundancies, but the right arguments can not be made often enough.


The first article is by the NJ Star-Ledger’s aging columnist and former editor John Farmer.

He claims that “Employer-based health care is a thing of the past”.
The only other choice, he claims, is government-based health care:


“In one sense, the question for voters is this: Who can we best trust
to oversee health insurance? The federal government, with its spotty
record for efficiency but whose leaders face the wrath of the voters
if they get it wrong? Or the private insurance bigwigs whose chief
incentive is to increase profits in their own and their shareholders’
interest?”


The second article is a Star-Ledger editorial entitled “ ‘Takeover’
claim is GOP’s Big Lie”.


“But no one remotely connected with the Obama administration is
suggesting anything like a government takeover of medical care in
America. Yet the defenders of the status quo conjure up a dystopian
nightmare of ‘Obamacare’ with Soviet-style hospitals and drone-like
doctors and with faceless bureaucrats deciding who gets care and who
does not. (How they would be different from insurance company
bureaucrats is a mystery.)”


The third article is by Froma Harrop at RealClearPolitics.


She writes:


"The lights must dim around Google's data-storage centers every time
someone does a search for "government bureaucrat coming between you
and your doctor." Foes of the Democrats' health-reform proposals have
been chanting this on the hour for a year..."

After claiming, with some truth, that private insurance company
bureaucrats already do the same thing, she asks:


"But why has the idea of letting the government do what private
insurers do to save taxpayers money become such a hysterical hot
button?"


All three articles have a common denominator. They are examples of
ObamaCare proponents taking the status quo as the given, thus avoiding
the necessity of any analysis of how the government's policies have
created the very problems their "reform" is supposedly designed to
fix. This tactic is vital to their case, because any honest look at
cause and effect would lead to a greatly diminished government role
and more freedom as the logical solution.


Here are my posted comments on each.


To John Farmer –

Posted by zemack
March 02, 2010, 8:33PM


We’ve all heard the story of the fireman who starts fires, so that he
can be the first on the scene to “save” lives and property. (We had a
real live one of those living in my neighborhood, some years ago.)
Well, in regard to American health care, the government is that
fireman. All of the problems that ObamaCare allegedly addresses are
government created. And like that fireman, the politicians - Democrats
and many Republicans alike – now rush to fix the problems they created
with massive new government interference into healthcare. The health
insurance market is at the top of the list of government-created
problems.


Today’s health insurance industry is a government created monstrosity.
The “power” of the insurance companies derives directly from
government interference into the market. Thanks to the tax and
regulation-imposed employer-based, or third-party-payer, system, the
insurance company works not for the consumer of healthcare, but for
some third party. In other words, the consumer is not the customer.
But that’s not the only problem. Thousands of state-imposed insurance
mandates across the nation– from community rating to guaranteed issue
to benefits – force insurers to tailor their policies to the demands
of political pressure groups rather than market realities, and force
coverages on consumers that they may not want or can afford. These
mandates are nothing more than wealth redistribution masquerading as
“insurance”. The insurance companies are then protected from
competition through interstate trade barriers - imposed by government.


The health insurance industry that ObamaCare supporters love to
demonize is a scapegoat and a straw man, because it is in fact a
political creation. Our fireman proposes to save us from its own
creation! Our “private” health insurance industry is a government
controlled and protected series of state-based cartels operating in a
government-crippled insurance market. Our employer-based system that
Mr. Farmer laments is in the nature of fascism, or back-door
socialism, in which the private ownership is more of a mirage than a
reality.


The only practical and moral solution is a free market in health
insurance. Our current system is as far from a free market as one can
imagine short of overt socialized medicine.


A free market is one based on the recognition of individual rights,
which means the sanction of freedom of action. This freedom includes
the rights of patients, insurers, their customers, doctors, medical
products producers, and other healthcare professionals to freely
contract with each other through voluntary trade to mutual advantage.
The government’s role in a free market is limited but vital – to
protect the rights of all concerned, including enforcement of
contracts and prosecution of fraud and breech of contract. Otherwise,
people should be free of governmental coercion, which is what the
“free” in free market means.


Mr. Farmer is right that the employer-based - i.e., third-party-payer
- system of health insurance is unraveling. It was inevitable, and a
bad idea to begin with. But he misses the obvious: Our deteriorating
employer-based health insurance system is a failure of statism, not
freedom. Instead, he simply lauds supporters of totalitarian
healthcare, - excuse me, ObamaCare in all of its guises – as “those
who know something” and writes off opponents as ignorant. But this is
only a evasion, and sets the stage for his monumental booby trap –
that our only choice is between socialism and fascism:


“Who can we best trust to oversee health insurance? The federal
government, with its spotty record for efficiency but whose leaders
face the wrath of the voters if they get it wrong? Or the private
insurance bigwigs whose chief incentive is to increase profits in
their own and their shareholders’ interest?”


The individual citizen who is free to “oversee” his own healthcare and
health insurance needs doesn’t even warrant token consideration!
Interesting, eh?


Mr. Farmer is dead wrong. The choice is not between government-run
healthcare (socialized medicine) and the status quo (quasi government-
run healthcare). The choice is between government-run medicine (in all
of its incarnations) and a free market.

To the Star-Ledger (go to page 3 of the comments section) –

Posted by zemack
March 09, 2010, 10:03PM


The “Big Lie” is an appropriate topic for the Star-Ledger to
editorialize on in regard to healthcare. But it’s not the Republicans
that are employing it. It is the ObamaCare minions, including the
Editors here, who are employing that tactic to its fullest. The real
Big Lie is the claim that the only choice we have is between Obama’s
“reform” scheme and the status quo. But “the defenders of the status
quo” are not entirely accurate either. ObamaCare, the logical
consequence of which really will eventually be “Soviet-style hospitals
and drone-like doctors and with faceless bureaucrats deciding who gets
care and who does not”, is not an outright takeover of healthcare. It
is rather
another step in the decades-long, slow-motion advance toward an
eventual full takeover.


As I’ve been arguing here and elsewhere, the missing ingredients in
the entire Left-framed debate is an examination of the role that the
government has played in creating the problems healthcare “reform” is
supposed to correct, and the third alternative – reinstitution of a
free market in healthcare. Despite its strengths made possible by the
remaining free market fragments, all of the problems attributed to
American healthcare are consequences of prior government policies. The
runaway costs and the problem of pre-existing conditions are
government creations. Thanks to our government-imposed third-party-
payer (employer-based) system, thousands of state-imposed community
rating, guaranteed issue and benefits mandates, and legal trade
barriers barring interstate competition, our “private” health
insurance industry is actually a government controlled and protected
series of state-based cartels which is more in the nature of fascism
(back-door socialism) rather than any semblance of a market-based
system.


The health insurance industry that ObamaCare supporters love to
demonize is a scapegoat and a straw man, because it is in fact a
political creation. The alleged power of the insurance companies is an
extension of government power and would not be possible in a free
market.


Of course, making a government takeover of American healthcare
inevitable is what ObamaReform is all about, the Editors’
protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. But the Dems have
cleverly avoided concrete specifics in their plan, giving cover for
the Editors’ outrageously false claim that “no one remotely connected
with the Obama administration is suggesting anything like a government
takeover of medical care in America”. No. Instead, their plan contains
the theoretical blueprint for future totalitarian control of every
aspect of healthcare. What does anyone think a 2000 page document is
full of? The trick is that the specifics will come later under powers
granted to government officials, in the form of an unending tidal wave
of coercive rules and regulations.


In an analysis of only a small part of one version of ObamaCare, the
House’s HR3962, Professor John David Lewis cites numerous examples of
this in his Objective Standard essay, which can be read in full in the
Winter 2009/2010 issue (theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2009-winter/
affordable-health-care-america-hr-3962.asp). His conclusion:


“[The plan] will reach deeply into federal and state regulations and
laws, on a scale that will require years for experts to interpret. It
will establish institutions that will be effectively irreversible. It
will grant arbitrary powers to bureaucrats, who will have to interpret
and enforce its dictates.


“This legislation empowers the executive branch, namely the Secretary
of Health and Human Services and a ‘Health Choices Commissioner,’ to
write thousands of pages of regulations, and to force Americans to
comply with them. For every line in this bill, many pages of
regulations will be written.


“The central meaning of both is the repudiation of individual rights.
No longer will Americans have the liberty to preserve their own lives
in the way they judge best—from now on, they will have to conform to
government controls on the most intimate details of their lives.”


The Big Lie is alive and well, and firmly ensconced in the Obama
Whitehouse … and in the offices of the Star-Ledger Editorial Board.

And to Froma Harrop –

Posted by: Mike Zemack
Mar 12, 07:26 PM


“The powers in Washington have clearly decided to keep most working
Americans in the hands of private insurance companies.”


So laments Ms. Harrop. The statement is true, but off by about seventy
years. Decades ago, the Federal government established the third-party-
payer, or employer-based, system of health insurance. This created an
artificial middleman that disconnected the consumer of healthcare from
the provider. Then came thousands of state-imposed insurance mandates
across the nation– from community rating to guaranteed issue to
benefits – that force insurers to tailor their policies to the demands
of political pressure groups rather than market realities … i.e., to
the desires and pocketbooks of the consumer, who is perversely not the
customer. These same insurers are protected from interstate
competition via interstate trade barriers imposed by government.


We’ve all heard the story of the fireman who starts fires, so that he
can rush to the scene to “save” lives and property. (We had a real
live one of those living in my neighborhood, some years ago.) Well, in
regard to America’s health insurance system, the government is that
fireman.


The health insurance industry that ObamaCare supporters love to
demonize is a scapegoat and a straw man, because it is in fact a
political creation. The alleged power of the insurance companies is an
extension of government power and would not be possible in a free
market. Our fireman now proposes to save us from its own creation! Our
“private” health insurance industry is a government controlled and
protected series of state-based cartels operating in a government-
crippled insurance market. Our “private” health insurance system is in
the nature of fascism, or back-door socialism, and is not indicative
of a free market.


“Those who care to move this conversation to a more grownup level”
start by examining the role that government intervention has played in
placing the healthcare of Americans “in the hands of private insurance
companies.” They will find that it was the government itself.


The argument for “letting the government do what private insurers do”
is a red herring. It is a call for totalitarian centralized control of
medicine by government bureaucrats unconstrained by the need to earn a
profit … i.e., to satisfy their customers. Insurance company
bureaucrats empowered by our government-imposed third-party-payer
system are bad enough. Government bureaucrats possessing the legalized
power of physical force - i.e., a gun - would end the remaining
fragments of freedom to make our own healthcare decisions that we
still possess.


The Supreme Court legalized abortion in Rowe v. Wade based on the
argument that abortion is a health matter that should be decided
solely between a woman and her doctor. Fair enough. The solution to
the problems of health insurance rests with the same logic. Remove all
government restrictions in the national health insurance market.
Restrict government instead – to its proper role of enforcing laws
against fraud and breech of contract, mediating legitimate contractual
disputes between insurers and insured, and enforcing and protecting
contracts and contractual freedom … i.e., to protecting everyone’s
individual rights.


Health insurance is solely a matter between the individual and his
insurer, and their rights to contract freely to mutual advantage
should be protected. The natural incentives of the free market – the
consumer seeking the best value for his money from profit-seeking
providers seeking to expand sales in an environment of real
competition – is the only moral way to “control costs” because people
must consume in accordance with what they have earned and providers
must price their products to their customers’ budgets. A government
that “controls costs” ends up controlling people … i.e., ends up as a
dictatorship.


In a free market “no one is going to come between patients and their
doctors” because no one can come between patients and their insurers …
or their healthcare dollars.

The Criminal Socialist Agenda Behind the ‘Anti-Racism’ Movement

If you oppose a single payer health care scheme, you are a racist. So Doctor Toby Terwilliger strongly implies in his New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column There’s no racial justice without health justice.

Like “climate crises” and the history re-writing 1619 Project, so-called “racial justice” is not what it implies. Just as the climate crisis is not about climate and the 1619 Project is not about slavery, so racial justice is not about color-blind law. It is about advancing a criminal--that is, state-imposed--socialism on all Americans. 

And what justification does Terwilliger offer? Statistics, the last refuge of damned liars. Terwilliger trots out stats showing “disparities” in healthcare outcomes between racial groups. Statistics tell you nothing about individuals that make up the groups, of course. But of course collectivists don’t care about actual individual human beings.

It’s true that some people can’t afford the best healthcare, or even adequate healthcare. Like any other good or service, stuff costs money. But not being able to afford something does not give you the right to steal from others. Burglars do that. A just person does not. Nor does a just person expect the government to steal on his behalf. Al Capones use proxies, or hired guns. That is not a just government. 

Plenty can be done to reduce the massive government interference that makes healthcare so expensive, such as health insurance mandates and restrictions on competition like licensing restrictions and Certificates-of-Need imposed on providers. Terwilliger cites one big problem, caused by the government, “the marriage of insurance with employment,” that is easily rectified by reducing, not increasing, government interference in healthcare. Why do you need to outlaw private health insurance to end that? Just eliminate the tax preferences that effectively prevent health insurance from being portable, like homeowners, life, and auto insurance. 

Plenty can be done to increase health insurance affordability. But affordability is not the single payer’s goal. The motive is much more sinister--egalitarianism. Economic inequality, including healthcare outcome inequality, is a fact of life and natural consequence of individual liberty. Any attempt to equalize health outcomes between groups--eliminating “disparities in health outcomes,” as Terwilliger puts it--necessarily means cutting away healthcare from everyone who has good coverage, in order to cut everyone down to equally mediocre healthcare. Hence, take away the best health insurance in America, private health insurance. If you’ve achieved something good, you are necessarily unequal to those who haven’t. You must be punished. This, I submit, is the essence of injustice. Equality in any aspect other than equality of individual rights before the law, including rights to property and trade, is unjust.

About 180 million Americans have private health insurance, albeit heavily regulated insurance. As Terwilliger points out, 80% of black Americans are insured. Many, no doubt, are among those with private health insurance--the very insurance single payer would outlaw. Do they have a choice? Not all black lives, it seems, matter to Black Lives Matter.

Don’t think socialized medicine is the only goal of the “anti-racists.” Terwilliger writes:

The May 25th murder of George Floyd, have forced a national reckoning with our history of racism and injustice. The Black Lives Matter movement has dramatically shifted public opinion and has awakened a renewed sense of urgency to confront racism head-on. The movement has rightfully been indignant of police brutality and a broken criminal justice system. But the fight for racial justice cannot stop there. Black lives must be seen to matter in education, housing, the workplace, and all other facets of life if we can ever hope to achieve racial justice.

[My emphasis]

If racial justice matters in education, the workplace, housing, and all other facets of life in the same way as it should matter in healthcare, the result will be totalitarian socialism. America will become one huge slave plantation. The Confederate intellectual George Fitzhugh called slavery “the best form of socialism”. Marxism simply expanded the concept to the entire society, replacing the plantation master with the state as the owner of the slave (page 20-22). The slave never has to “choose between putting food on the table or paying for their child’s medications.” No more job worries. No more mundane need to make budgeting decisions. The state takes care of it all. 

Under single payer healthcare, the state calls the shots. The medical profession is enslaved. If the single payer concept is extended to “all other facets of life,” in the name of racial justice, where does that leave America? The “national reckoning with our history of racism and injustice” that so many Americans are blindly falling all over themselves to show support for is a criminal socialist Trojan Horse. The re-mainstreaming of race and racism is geared to guilting Americans into accepting full-blown socialism. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Related Reading:

The Only Obamacare Fix Is For Obama To Legalize Real Health Insurance by Paul Hsieh

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care” by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh for The Objective Standard

GOP ObamaCare Repeal: The Left Opposes Cuts in Spending and Controls—What’s New?

In knee-jerk fashion, the Left came out in force against the Trump Republicans’ ObamaCare repeal-and-replace bill dubbed “American Health Care Act.” In Will Jersey's GOP throw millions off health care?, the New Jersey Star-Ledger railed against cuts in subsidies to the middle class, hospitals, and other groups, cuts in Medicaid, redistribution of wealth from the young to the old, etc., etc., etc. The Star-Ledger also rails, rightfully, I think, against NJ’s GOP congressman's hesitancy about confronting pro-ObamaCare, anti-Trump activists at town hall meetings and other public forums.

I left these comments, citing this quote as an opening:

“This bill shrinks the subsidies for middle-class families, and phases out the Medicaid expansion . . .”

The socialist statists on the Left will always oppose cuts in spending, subsidies, taxes, and controls, no matter how small. And they have never met an expanded spending scheme, new regulation, or tax hike they couldn’t love. They’re after power, and power derives from dependence on government redistributive handouts. Hell has no fury like a government dependent threatened with loss of his subsidy, whether a hospital corporation or a low-income individual.

The larger question is, how did we get to the point where even the middle class can’t afford  something so basic as health insurance? Decades of government controls and interference, that’s how. Any suggestion of legalizing affordable healthcare by rolling back these controls threatens the Left’s insatiable lust for power. So, they oppose it at every turn.

Take the alleged “big tax cut for the richest among us,” which the Star-Ledger erroneously labels a “subsidy.” The real facts are these: First, a tax cut is not a subsidy. Keeping more of what one earns is the opposite of getting a payment from the government. Second, it’s a “tax cut for the rich” because it was a tax increase on the rich to begin with.The tax cut would simply return to the pre-ObamaCare tax level. The ObamaCare tax hike was redistributive, and thus immoral, from the start. Lowering subsidies and the taxes that fund it; what could be more American than that?

Of course, that shouldn’t be done in a vacuum, which leads to initiatives like expanded tax free health savings accounts. HSAs enable anyone with employer health insurance to take control of the money the employer otherwise would have spent on the employee’s behalf, buy health insurance that suits her individual needs, and make it portable like car, life, and homeowners insurance so the loss of a job doesn’t result in loss of health insurance. HSAs foster independence, self-reliance, and—coupled with elimination of benefit mandates and other de-controls—lower cost policies. The Left hates free market ideas like HSAs and de-control because it conflicts with their power-hungry drive to subvert the middle class into a welfare class.

The fact is, this bill doesn’t go nearly far enough in free market reforms. It preserves the pre-existing conditions mandate, a big part of the problem of cost, without fixing the government policies that make it a big problem. It preserves the immoral practice of forcing the young to subsidize the old through government-imposed health insurance, without fixing the government policies that would enable older people to have achieved long term lower costs (such as with guaranteed renewable policies). It preserves subsidies by a different name. It doesn’t fully legalize real health insurance.

This GOP bill is essentially another government scheme—ObamaCare without Obama—not substantive progress toward restoration of individual rights and a free market in healthcare. Yet Republicans are still demonized. To get a really good bill, the GOP is going to have to ignore the demonization of the statist Left. The issue is not about “throwing millions off healthcare.” It’s about making government dependence unnecessary for accessible, self-funded health insurance. Rather than hide from their constituents, GOPers should seize the opportunity to explicitly stand up for individual self-determination over government dependence. They’re going to be demonized no matter what. They might as well seize the moral high road, which naturally belongs to the pro-liberty “hard Right.”

Related Reading:

From RomneyCare Without Romney to ObamaCare Without Obama?

In ObamaCare Repeal Debate, Who is the Real ‘Taker’

Replacing ObamaCare Should Mean Replacing Government Planning With Individual Planning

ObamaCare: The End of the Beginning

To Deny the Consequences of ObamaCare, Deny the Principles

The Left's False Alternative on Health Care