"Crunch Time" for Some Truths About ObamaCare

Today is the deadline for signing up for health insurance under ObamaCare, so it's a good time to reflect  a bit on what ObamaCare "achieves." A good place to start is with a staunch ObamaCare supporter, the New Jersey Star-Ledger. I commented on the Star-Ledger's editorial For Obamacare enrollment in NJ, it's crunch time, using selected quotes from the article. Here are my comments:

"When people don’t enroll, we all pay more. Not just for the uninsured’s emergency room bills, but also for insurance premiums, which will be higher if we don’t get young, healthy adults to sign up."

Who forces us to pay for the uninsured’s emergency room bills (which are usually not even emergencies)? The government, through the Reagan law, EMTALA. Rather than fix that problem by repealing EMTALA, ObamaCare compounds the problem by forcing higher premiums on younger people to subsidize older people. ObamaCare doesn't alleviate the "free-rider" problem. It creates more free riders.

"Because this much we know already: It has greatly reduced the uninsurance rate, and that’s a huge achievement."

As whose expense? The taxpayers whose wealth is seized to fund the subsidies of the newly insured. The wealth seized from younger people forced to pay higher premiums to subsidize lower premiums for others. The only "achievement" is the increased government power over our healthcare and our wealth. Liberty exhibit # 1: The SLEB claims that "After March 31, you won’t be able to buy individual health insurance anywhere unless you have some special circumstance. . ." ObamaCare made it illegal to purchase health insurance other than "insurance" sold under government direction. This is proof that those who warned that ObamaCare was a takeover of healthcare were right.

ObamaCare was sold on a lie. The problems ObamaCare was allegedly designed to fix could have been alleviated by removing previous government intrusions into healthcare, like the third-party-payer system, myriad insurance mandates, the state cartelization of health insurance, and various redistribution schemes.

The bottom line is that we are not our brothers' keepers. No one's need is a moral claim on another's life and wealth. Consumers and insurers should be free to contract voluntarily to mutual advantage, when they choose, on terms they choose. Government should mediate contract disputes and prosecute breach of contract and fraud. The corollary: Government should protect freedom of contract, not control the market and forcibly redistribute wealth.

Related Reading:

How ObamaCare Redistributes Wealth

Milton Wolf’s PatientCare: A Sensible Alternative to ObamaCare

Cost of Healthcare: ObamaCare Supporters Drop the Context to Support Their Case