An key argument peddled in defense of ObamaCare goes something like this:
Trump reiterated that he'd like to keep two of the law's most popular provisions: letting children up to the age of 26 stay on their parents' insurance, and forbidding insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, like cancer or diabetes.
The challenge is the second one. Not even Trump wants to return to the dark days when insurers refused to cover breast cancer survivors, or charged them sky-high premiums they couldn't afford. But most experts say it's impossible to keep this protection if you repeal the rest of Obamacare - the individual mandate that orders everyone to buy insurance, and the subsidies that help low-income, healthy people join the rolls.
Think about what will happen. If people aren't required to buy insurance, but know they can get it if they fall ill, many of them will save money by buying coverage only after they get sick. That would deprive insurers of premiums they need to cover their costs, forcing them to increase premiums dramatically. That, in turn, would prompt even more healthy people to quit buying insurance, a trend experts call the "death spiral
Or:
His proposal to turn Medicaid into block grants would only shift the burden of paying for the very poorest citizens to the states.
Or:
It's not clear that would even save money in the end. Because people without insurance would land in emergency rooms, where both the law and the dictates of human decency require hospitals to provide. Those hospitals then get help from the state through a program known as "charity care."
Those quotes are not made up. They are from a New Jersey Star-Ledger editorial from November 2016, before Trump took office. In Trumpcare': Kicking 22 million off health insurance?, The Star-Ledger sums it up: “In other words, we pay either way.”
I left these comments, edited for clarity:
And why is that? Because “either way,” the government forces “we” to pay. Welcome to the welfare state—the slow bleed toward totalitarian socialism. Statists have saddled us with so many wealth redistribution schemes that no one can escape being forced to pay for others’ needs. Western socialists discovered long ago that the communist path to socialism wouldn’t work in the West. So they adopted the backdoor approach—fascism. Fascism is socialism without government ownership. As the infamous leader of Germany’s National Socialist Workers Party explained about 8 decades ago:
“Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good…This is Socialism- not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over all, regardless of whether they are owners or workers…Our Socialism goes far deeper…[the people] have entered a new relation…What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.” [From Herman Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction, as quoted in The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff, page 231-232.]
If “we pay either way,” we are on our way to being fully trapped “firmly within a discipline we cannot escape.” We’re already part way there, and with each new welfare state expansion—ObamaCare created a whole new class of parasites—we’re told we can’t repeal it because “we pay either way.” Trapped.
That’s why, in order to repeal and replace ObamaCare, we must challenge the very concept of the regulatory welfare state and the forced redistribution of wealth that it rests on. To do that, we need to protect each individual’s right to decide for himself who, when, how, and in what capacity to help others. Government has no legitimate role in charity.
Abolishing the welfare state can’t be done overnight. It must be done slowly but systematically to give people time to adjust back to freedom and individual rights and the self-responsibility that goes with it. A good place to start is with the repeal of the pre-existing conditions mandate, the heart of ObamaCare. To do that, we must remove the biggest cause of pre-existing conditions, the third-party-payer system, and replace it with individual ownership of insurance like life, auto, and homeowners. We must also repeal all of the insurance mandates, which drive up the cost for everyone and bars insurers from selling new policies that exclude, charge more for, or include delayed coverage for pre-existing conditions. These regulations leave people with pre-existing conditions with no insurance for anything because of a single condition. There are plenty of other free market reforms needed, like insurance riders that specifically cover pre-existing conditions, enabling people who lose or change insurance carriers to get new coverage without losing coverage for their pre-existing condition.
This is just a sample of the reforms we need. Health insurance is morally a matter between consumers, providers, and insurers that government coercion shouldn’t interfere with. People should be free to shop for the coverage that best suits their needs and wallets from competing insurers, rather than be forced into overpriced government-mandated policies. But that won’t even happen. Trump has already said he will keep the pre-existing mandate. He is a center-left, big spending welfare state liberal, after all. We’ll end up with TrumpCare, which will essentially be ObamaCare without Obama with a dash more healthcare freedom scattered here or there. Trump will not reverse the statist trend, and we will continue down the path toward a government-imposed discipline we cannot escape. I don’t know what the Left is so worried about.
Related Reading:
The Road To Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Pre-existing Conditions—Yaron Brook and Don Watkins
7 comments:
Greetings
Not here to discuss or argue. I need a source on that quote which I assume is from Hitler, or it could be Goebbels, he was fairly obsessed with the term socialism. It can even be one of the Strassers. Either a date, or where you got it from is fine. If its from a book, can you include the bibliography of it, but it's not necessary.
With Regards
Sorry. I forgot to post the source. It's from Hitler. My source is Herman Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction page 191-193, as quoted in The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff, page 231-232. I've added it to the post. Thanks.
(https://www.amazon.com/Ominous-Parallels-End-Freedom-America/dp/0452011175/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459012585&sr=1-1&keywords=the+ominous+parallels+by+leonard+peikoff)
Greetings (re-post to correct a historical error)
Thank for the source. I suspected that this was from Rauschning's book, as googling only directed towards that book. That book has been contested in its credibility by historians, to the point that I contest any book nowadays that uses it as a source uncritically. It also doesn't really fit most historico-political interpretations of the history of the Nazi Party. The 1920 platform was never really pursued, and after they failed in 1928 trying to run mostly as a worker's party, they pretty much had to restrain the anti antisemitism and tried to run as a middle of the road party, that promised everything to everyone. That still wasn't enough to earn them a majority, even with massive violence and intimidation, so they just ended up seizing power in 1933 after , like, three consecutive elections. There was a leftover contingent of genuine pro worker racist socialists lead by Rommel and the Strasserites, but their existence made business interests nervous, and so Hitler had them murdered in the Night of the Long Knives. Even then, the "left" wing of the NSDAP was still to the extreme right overall, and since they basically got all wiped out, there's no real point in discussion their roles after 1934
It's also noteworthy to mention that Europe has a history of parties labeling themselves as socialist without identifying with them,like the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance in France which was certainly not socialist. The Czech National Socialist party was also another one, which was not a Socialist party. The thing is, in Europe the right was often very unpopular, to the point where people were afraid to even label themselves as right wing, and wanted to adopt left wing symbols as well. The same goes for some of their policies. Social welfare really wasn't that much of a left wing policy at the time.
With Regards
Regardless of competing historical interpretations, the quote ascribed to Hitler well captures the essentials of fascism and of national socialism.
The Right-Left spectrum, properly understood, logically refers to opposites. But, in modern usage, the Right-Left spectrum has been distorted beyond usefulness. Fascism is now considered “Right,” and communism “Left.,” even though both are collectivist (and thus socialist), statist, and hostile to individual rights, including both economic and intellectual freedom. Note that modern usage leaves no room on the Right-Left spectrum for freedom based on individual rights, constitutional republican government, or capitalism, which I call Americanism (in the philosophical sense). No wonder. The fundamental spectrum is individualism versus collectivism. Americanism (individualism) is the only opposite of any form of statism (collectivism), which is why both Right and Left stand opposed to Americanism.
Say there, the left-right spectrum leaves no room for individual rights. Left-right means communism,(or Nazism)-conservatism, meaning varying degrees of abrogation of individual rights. That's an example of a spectrum, but not of opposites.
Individualism versus collectivism (communism-conservatism, which is a spectrum)? Individualism and collectivism are opposites, not a spectrum (contrary to leading Objectivists). There's a wall of separation between these two. They are, philosophically, mutually exclusive of each other. Contrary to leading Objectivists, the left-right spectrum is to be ignored, except as antagonistic, by those who opt for reason, egoism and, in human relations, unalienable individual rights.
The communism-conservatism (collectivist) spectrum is varying degrees of CRIME! On the other side of the wall, individualism has its own spectrum which, in human relations, is best expressed, thru elections, as how best to protect society of all kinds from CRIME. Society (relations started without the use of physical force) of any imaginable sort, is the spectrum on the theme of individualism.
There are variations on themes, and there are mutually exclusive opposites which, in relations, are those of human life or death. Communism-conservatism is a variation on the theme of collectivism and crime. Society is the variation of the theme of individualism in relations. Collectivism is a spectrum. Individualism is a spectrum. In human relations, these two spectrums are mutually exclusive of each other in terms of human life or death. Either/or. Individualism and capitalism are mutually exclusive of conservatism as well as of communism. Anybody's use of the term, right wing, must not be allowed to smear the meaning of individualism and of capitalism.
"Anybody's use of the term, right wing, must not be allowed to smear the meaning of individualism and of capitalism."
Amen to that, Mike.
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