The Bamboozled column implicitly raised another important question: What is the alternative to the problems caused by the 3rd-party-payer system of health insurance?
I responded to a correspondent's diatribe against the "scam" of "corporate medical predators making decisions of life and death for citizens of this country" and in favor of ObamaCare.
After a good start—"The stupidity of tying health benefits to employment is a national disgrace."—his comments went downhill. He wrote:
This country in it's divine wisdom has allowed corporations to take financial control of our lives as predators once we fall through the employment cracks that are part of middle class existence in this country. Take a look around at the leading cause of mortgage foreclosures in this country. It's medical care if you still have you head up your butt. Obama care is the first step in correcting the injustice and if you want to keep blaming this guy for attempting to correct the crappy third world medical care you are completely uninformed. I'd love to hear a reasonable alternative to healthcare from one of these crusaders against "Obama Care". Has anyone against Obama Care given us a reasonable alternative to the crap program that was financially destroying this country.Strip healthcare from employment for everyone and you would give business a level playing field with the rest of the world.
He goes on, but you get the picture. My reply:
"The stupidity of tying health benefits to employment is a national disgrace."
You state the truth, and then evade the cause. Instead, you echo the false choice always offered by state supremacists: the status quo vs. totalitarian healthcare. But the status quo is a politically corrupted mixed system of massive government controls and limited freedom. You ask for a reasonable alternative to ObamaCare, but ObamaCare is just more of the same political corruption that is causing the many problems in the first place.
Rather than fantasize over some dark conspiratorial "corporate scam," you should look at the real culprit—the government. Branco-like predicaments are the direct result of government policies that created the 3rd-party-payer system. This put employers (or in some cases, unions), rather than the individual, in control of the individual's health insurance.
The solution to our "third world" healthcare is not to reward the culprit with slave-master power over healthcare providers and life-and-death control over patients' healthcare decisions—an actual third world "solution." The reasonable alternative to ObamaCare is to end government policies that drive the current insurance system, and empower through individual rights the liberty of the individual to own his own health insurance in the same way as life, auto, homeowners, and other types of insurance. If that were the case today, the Branco's absurd predicament wouldn't have arisen, and Ms. Mueller's column wouldn't even have been written.
We face a fundamental moral choice in America; taking personal responsibility for our own healthcare decisions in a free market, or reneging that responsibility to government bureaucrats with totalitarian powers. So far, the healthcare totalitarians are winning, and here's the shame of it: The totalitarians are winning, not for any lofty purpose, but because the renegers who want escape from personal responsibility are growing at the expense of the self-responsible. Thus, the government is cashing in with ever-growing power on problems that itself caused.
To be continued.
Related Reading:
The Left's False Alternative on Healthcare
No comments:
Post a Comment