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

‘Medicare-for-All’ is no ‘Solution’ to Pandemic-Related Job Layoffs

In a 3/19/20 New Jersey Star-Ledger letter to the editor titled Layoff threat proves need for Medicare for All, Nate Hutchinson of Hoboken, NJ wrote, in part:

Hoboken is threatening to lay off 79 municipal employees to fix its budget deficit, citing (among other factors) the rising cost of providing these employees with health insurance, which is administered by a private (for-profit) third party. At a recent city council meeting, many of those threatened with layoffs described the hardships they would face if they lost their jobs and their health coverage.

Hutchinson’s solution; Medicare-for-All to “provide health coverage to every U.S. resident that is free at the point of use and lower national health spending in the process.”

Criminal socialists of the American Left have been exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to push this line. I fired off this letter to the Star-Ledger:

To the editors,

Some are citing the Covid-19 pandemic as “proof” of the “need” for Medicare-for-All because many who are losing their jobs in this health emergency will also lose their health insurance. If we already had Medicare-for-All, the argument goes, this would not be a problem. 

But Medicare-for-All would outlaw private health insurance, strip 180 million Americans of their health insurance and force them into a government program whether they agree or not, an immoral (and probably unconstitutional) approach. Worse, Medicare-for-All would essentially enslave the doctors and regiment the entire healthcare industry under a coercive monopsony from which there is no escape, stifling innovative healthcare progress.

That said, employer-based health insurance is a real problem for people losing their jobs. The moral, rights-respecting solution would be to revise the tax and regulatory laws so that health insurance is treated like homeowners, auto, and other types of insurance. What the Covid-19 pandemic actually proves is that if these reforms had been done years ago, the loss of a job wouldn’t mean loss of health insurance.

Sincerely,

Michael A. LaFerrara

Hutchinson concludes with a complaint “that private health insurers use their political power to block any reforms. Hoboken’s city workers deserve better than this. So do the rest of us.”

Political clout? Who the hell is Hutchinson to speak for “the rest of us?” Who the hell is he to advocate using “political clout”—the point of a governmental gun— to impose his Medicare-for-All on the rest of us? 

Kudos to the private health insurers for exercising their First Amendment rights to lobby to block the implementation of this monstrosity. Private health insurers would be among the biggest victims of Medicare-for-All. They use their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, assembly, and petition to defend themselves. But whenever a person or group of persons defend their own rights, they defend the rights of all. These insurers speak also for those of us who want to preserve the remnants of freedom and individual rights that still remains in American healthcare.

* [NOTE: I sent this letter in on 3/19/20. As of 3/28/20, it was not yet published. I would change one word. In the first paragraph, I would change the word “the” in the phrase “the argument goes” to “one,” so as to read “If we already had Medicare-for-All, one argument goes, this would not be a problem.”]

Related Reading:

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

How Doctors Broke Health Care by Christy Ford Chapin for Reason.com

As ObamaCare Failures Pile Up, Get Ready for the Mother-of-All Healthcare Battles

To Start With, Single Payer is Immoral

The Problem of the "Unemployed and Uninsured"

The False Alternative to the 3rd-Party-Payer System

Blaming the Remaining Fragments of Healthcare Freedom for Problems Caused by Government

Why a “Right” to Health Care is a Moral Travesty by John Hersey for The Objective Standard

What ‘System’ Do HSAs Harm?

A bill making its way through Congress would expand Health Savings Accounts, the tax shelter tailored to individuals. Jonathan D. Salant explains the bill for NJ.com:

Health care legislation passed by the U.S. House before departing for its annual August recess will do little to lower premiums or provide more Americans with insurance, but will give a bigger break to wealthier taxpayers, according to studies and experts.

Two bills focused on expanding Health Savings Accounts [HSAs], which are funded with pre-tax dollars and are combined with bare-bones plans that cover only major expenses. That puts most of the burden for paying medical expenses on individuals, but they can use tax-free savings to cover them.

They would expand the list of allowable expenses from the accounts and increase the maximum contribution to $6,900 from $3,450 for individuals and $13,300 from $6,900 for families.

The “bigger break” is people keeping more of what they earn. But welfare statists see no difference between that and getting a government handout funded by other people's’ taxes. Notice that paying for one’s own healthcare is characterized as a “burden,” not a personal responsibility and right. The bias toward the entitlement mentality and government control, and against achievement and success, is obvious.

Not surprisingly, then, this article, published in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, is titled New Republican plan to address Obamacare gives biggest breaks to the rich. Going on, Savant reports:

"These bills provide more opportunities for higher-income people to tax shelter but won't really make much a difference in the health care system," said Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies health care. [sic]

I left these comments:

What, exactly, is “the health care system?”

Statists hate the idea of people keeping more of their own money, and spending it as they see fit. To these statists, “the system” has nothing to do with actual individual human beings. It has everything to do with central control and wealth redistribution.

But the “system” is people--real, live individual people, each with their own needs and values and goals. The GOP bill expands freedom of individuals to take care of themselves, expanding peoples’ ability to manage their own affairs with their own money according to their own judgement, while maximizing the most frugal uses of their money. HSAs liberate people to tailor healthcare more to their needs and values, while reducing dependence on third party payers like employers, leaving the holder’s healthcare less vulnerable to losing her job. HSAs reduce the tax discrimination against individuals and in favor of employers, thus adding more fairness.

The government shouldn’t be interfering in peoples’ health care choices at all. But as long as it does--and it does so on a massive scale--any small attempt to reduce the infringement on individuals’ rights is a welcome step.

There is plenty wrong with “the system,” such as the myriad government mandates and government-stifled competition that drive up premiums, and they should be dealt with. Those who oppose policies that expand individual freedom, such as HSAs, cannot claim to care about “the health care system.”

----------------------------------------

Such is the Leftist bias in Star-Ledger reporting. I want to make clear that I am in favor of a flat tax, with no deductions or credits that favor some but not others.

Related Reading;

No Free Market Health Reform Will "Work"—by Socialist Standards

How to End the "Hostage" Crisis

The Healthcare Alternative: Government Planning vs. Individual Planning

Being Against the Birth Control Mandate is Not Being Against Birth Control

In 2014, the Supreme Court approved a narrow exemption for private businesses to opt out of the birth control mandate instituted under the ACA (ObamaCare) for religious reasons. Through regulatory changes, President Trump recently expanded the freedom of employers to opt out of the ObamaCare birth control mandate.  According to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation,

The Trump Administration has issued new regulations that significantly broaden employers’ ability to be exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) contraceptive coverage requirement.  The regulation opens the door for any employer or college/ university with a student health plan with objections to contraceptive coverage based on religious beliefs to qualify for an exemption. Any nonprofit or closely-held for-profit employer with moral objections to contraceptive coverage also qualifies for an exemption. Their female employees, dependents and students will no longer be entitled to coverage for the full range of FDA approved contraceptives at no cost.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger ranted Trump's quest: higher teen pregnancy rates, more abortions:

These are the extraordinary health consequences when we increase access to birth control, not only domestically but worldwide:

Better access has resulted in lower HIV rates, lower mother-to-child transmission of HIV, lower infant mortality rates, fewer abortions (both safe and unsafe), and it allows people to plan pregnancies, which results in better health for both mother and child.

I left these comments, edited for clarity:

No one is proposing to outlaw birth control. No one is proposing to make it illegal for anyone to voluntarily help a woman financially who can’t afford to pay for contraception out-of-pocket, or forbid that woman from seeking help from friends, family, or private charity. What the contraception mandate does is force some people to pay for other women’s contraception, and that’s immoral. It’s not about “access to birth control.” It’s about access to other people’s wallets—or not.

Having said that, carving out religious exemptions for this one insurance mandate is not enough. All insurance mandates should be abolished, so insurers can tailor policies to consumers’ demand, and consumers can more effectively buy the insurance they need, want, and that fits their budgets, whether businesses or individuals.

Don’t fall for the dishonest intellectual gimmickry. Being against the contraception mandate is not being against contraception. It does not mean being for more abortions, more HIV, more teen pregnancies, or less family planning. Only fools fall for that cruel “logic”. We each have our own lives to live. We are not our sisters’ keepers. Opposing the birth control mandate is being against legalized theft—a government as a tool of plunder to pick some people’s pockets for the unearned benefit of another. The insurance industry should not be a tool of socialist government policies. That’s fascism. Every individual is morally responsible for paying for her own healthcare needs, and insurance is a tool to help her do that, to be used when and as she sees fit. But no one has a right to insurance coverage that others don’t voluntarily provide, or that others are made to subsidize against their will.

Related Reading:

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

SCOTUS Hobby Lobby Decision Skirts the Fundamental Issue

The Interlocking Web of Rights-violating Laws that Gave Rise to the Hobby Lobby Controversy

Leftist Hobby Lobby Critics' Mischaracterize Rights, Fear "Slippery Slope" to More Liberty

More on the Left's Fear of a Hobby Lobby "Slippery Slope" to More Liberty

Christie’s Insurance Mandate is a ‘Teachable Moment’

Rebuttal to Dianne Douthat: Pro-Medicaid is Not Pro-life

An advocate of ObamaCare and Medicaid attempted to attach the label “pro-life” to support for those programs. In a letter published on July 29, 2017 in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Dianne Douthat wrote “If you’re pro-life, here’s something you should know.” That opening statement is followed by a litany of Medicaid beneficiaries, as if any good end somehow justifies whatever means happened to be employed. The letter concludes:

Without Medicaid, millions of American lives — including infants, children, the elderly, veterans and addicts — will be in danger. How is it possible that the [Republican] party that says it’s prolife is also looking to dismantle a program that sustains life?

It’s time for our senators who proclaim they are pro-life to prove it. It’s time to put people before politics, and before tax cuts, and improve, not dismantle, the ACA and Medicaid coverage. If you’re pro-life, take action— contact your senators today. [sic] [NOTE: A version of this letter appeared in Wayne Patch under the title If you're Pro -Life.]

First of all, let’s get honest: The Republican Party is not looking to dismantle Medicaid (unfortunately). Far from it. It plans to increase Medicaid spending, but at a slower rate than current law, with its built-in automatic increases. According to CNN Money, the now defunct Republicans’ Senate scheme would have increased Medicaid spending by 18% over the next ten years. The GOP plan is only a cut “in budget parlance,” as the New York Times put it with a straight face. Medicaid apologists whine that the slower growth would result in fewer people being covered by the program. True. An ever-growing Medicaid budget will inevitably suck more people into dependence, which of course welfare statists welcome. But, coupled with free market reforms, Medicaid reduction would mean more people would find private insurance cheaper and more affordable, should they choose to buy it. This, not an ever-expanding parasite class, should be the goal.

As to the more important issue, Douthat’s got it backwards. The true test of a “pro-life” person is, “does she leave people free to self-govern according to their own judgement—including the freedom to say ‘no’ to another’s charitable crusades?” Pro-life answers yes. Douthat answers no, and thus fails this test. Medicaid fails this test. Douthat and Medicaid are not pro-life.

Medicaid starts with armed government aggression against productive people, via the taking of the earnings of the productive people through taxes to fund Medicaid. Is this what Douthat means by “put people before politics?” Are taxpayers not people?

Is stripping these individuals of their right to decide if, when, whom, and in what capacity to help others—and instead forcing them to fund whom politicians think should be “helped”—what Douthat means by “put people before politics?”

Is forcing doctors, the people we depend upon to provide the medical service, into the position of having to turn away patients or treat people at a loss because of prices dictated by politically-appointed government bureaucrats what Douthat means by “put people before politics?” Are doctors not people?

Decades of government interference into medicine and health insurance, including through programs like Medicaid, has driven the cost up so high that one in four people can’t afford it without Medicaid. Is this what Douthat means by “put people before politics?”

Douthat is right that the problem is people versus politics. But she’s got it exactly backwards. The problem isn’t people. It’s politics. Millions of people sweat out over their health coverage, as Republicans seek to place minor restrains on these out-of-control programs, and Democrats can do no better than to mercilessly demonize the other party. The fact that so many people’s health coverage is at the mercy of goings-on in Washington is precisely because the politicization of medicine has put politics over people—people’s money and rights.

Douthat provides a litany of beneficiaries but not a word about the victims of Medicaid, which includes many of Medicaid’s alleged “beneficiaries”—people priced out of the market by government interference or forced onto ObamaCare after ObamaCare outlawed their existing policies. Not a word about the dreadful consequences of continuing on the path of ever-expanding, unrestricted growth of American welfare statism, not just Medicaid but all of the other “helpful” programs. But Douthat’s “good” intentions don't justify the corrupt means. As Thomas Aquinas taught, a good intention can never redeem a bad action. Pro-life means the right to life. The right to life is more than treating humans like caged animals, meeting their basic needs but no more. It’s about being in control of one’s own life, and the freedom to act on one’s own judgement in pursuit of the values one judges to be necessary to achieve good, flourishing life—that is, happiness—without having to seek permission and without coercive interference. Douthat doesn’t respect these fundamental, individual human rights. and so she can no more claim the label “pro-life” than Republicans who deny a woman’s right to reproductive freedom under the same empty slogan. Only proponents of liberty can give real meaning to the term “pro-life.”

Douthat claims that these programs “sustain life.” But that’s not true. Productive individuals, free to earn and keep money, wealth, and property in a free market of voluntary trade, sustain life. Need alone cannot satisfy human need. Only productive, purposeful action can satisfy human needs. That’s why putting need above productiveness (and the freedom productiveness depends upon) is anti-, not pro-, life. Parasites on and exploiters of the productive are a drag on, not sustainers, of life. Every new program drains wealth from the pockets of the private sector, pushing more and more people into the “needy” camp, leading to calls for yet another and then another new welfare program to “help” these folks—folks forced into the needy camp by similar prior programs. And each of these existing programs trigger regular calls to expand them, as ObamaCare did with Medicaid. The assault on the productive intensifies in a never-ending cycle. That’s why socialism always leads to increasing economic paralysis, spreading poverty, and ultimately collapse into widespread destitution. When productiveness is sacrificed to need, the ultimate result is shrinking productiveness and widening need, with the final result being unfilled needs. Private charity programs rest on productiveness, and are sustainable and valuable when completely voluntary and private. Government-imposed programs like Medicaid and its ilk are the opposite. They are malignant social cancers because based on force rather than voluntarism. Force is ant-life.

If you really want to “put people before politics,” get politicians out of regulating medicine. Stop them from putting the healthcare security of increasing millions of Americans at the mercy of forcing higher taxes and regulations on their fellow citizens. Stop them from forcing some people to pay for other people’s healthcare, in effect making some the slaves to the needs of others. It’s morally corrupt at its core. Need before justice is inhumane. “a good intention can never redeem a bad action.” Eliminate Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, and all the rest of the “helpful” social programs politicians created; eliminate controls an health insurers, doctors, and the rest of the medical profession; and leave doctors, insurers, and healthcare consumers and patients free to contract with each other voluntarily to mutual advantage, neither forcing anyone to buy services they don’t want nor being forced to pay for others against their will nor empowering anyone to force others to pay for hers.

We need free market healthcare. People before politics: for real.

Related Reading:

The "Violence" of the Dems' Health Care Reform

Hillary Vs. Trump: Where’s the Opposition to Welfare State Violence?

Our Pick-Pocket Nation

Pre-Medicaid ‘System’ Points to the Moral Alternative to Medicaid: A Free Market Safety Net

America Before the Entitlement State—Yaron Brook and Don Watkin

A "Liberal" Newspaper Acknowledges the Welfare State Dilemma

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

NJ Gov. Candidate Wants to Bring 'Medicare-for-all' into Healthcare Debate. Good. Let's Bury It

With ObamaCare repeal and replace on the front burner in Washington, an obscure candidate for the 2017 New Jersey gubernatorial election is trying to lift a complete government takeover of American healthcare into the thick of the debate. This fits with the Democrats’ far-Left agenda.

In Gov. candidate: Lacking in health-care debate: Medicare-for-all for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Green Party candidate Seth Kaper-Dale wrote:

The Republicans had seven years to come up with a viable replacement to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), but today [July 17, 2017] Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky admitted to defeat when he couldn't find 50 senators to vote on a bill that would have left millions without healthcare. Absent an Obamacare substitute, the president wants a vote to repeal it, which would reverse more than 50 years of improvements in coverage for Americans.

I've listened closely to defenders of Obamacare and proponents of the Republican plans, but until recently few congressional representatives argued primarily about care; most talk about insurance. Both plans assumed Americans are obliged to throw money into a poorly-regulated private industry.  It's unnecessary.

Yes, it is. Money shouldn’t be thrown into the health insurance industry. Nor should regulations. Government money and regulation, built up over decades, have caused the steadily increasing disfunction of healthcare.

But his solution is worse than the disease. Medicare-for-all is just what it sounds like—single, meaning monopsony, financing of healthcare coercively commandeered by the federal government. Rather than admit the obvious—that government has had its chance are running healthcare, and it has failed—Kaper-Dale would reward government with total control. Notice also that Kaper-Dale, a cleric, ignores the immorality of using government force not to protect individuals’ rights to govern their own monetary and healthcare decisions, but to repudiate and alienated those rights from the people. This, of course, is what altruism demands.

I left this rebuttal commentary, edited for clarity:

After decades of government intervention in American healthcare, starting with the “original sin” of intervention—the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored healthcare—we’ve reached the ultimate absurdity; “unaffordable” healthcare at nearly 20% of GDP—financed by us, the very people who allegedly can’t afford healthcare without government “help.” Now, we’re to reward the cause of all of our problems in healthcare and health insurance with totalitarian control? Kaper-Dale proposes, as a solution to the problems caused by government, to disregard the rights of consumers, businessmen, and doctors, and force everyone into government control.  This is irrationality that borders on insane. It is cruel, dishonest, impractical, immoral, and wrong. You don’t reward the culprit by stripping away from the victims of government intervention their last meager elements of private control and freedom.

Our current healthcare is a quasi-socialized mixture of communism and fascism, built piece by piece, with only 10% of healthcare spending controlled by consumers. Don’t be suckered by simple-minded assurances like “universal healthcare puts healthcare financing into the hands of the state while delivery of care remains largely in the hands of the same healthcare professionals.” He who pays the piper calls the tune. State funding is tyranny, plain and simple. Freedom is individuals spending their own money as they judge best. Under single state payer, your doctor will be beholden to government cost-cutting bureaucrats, not you. The patient, in fact, will be cut out from the equation. As Kaper-Dale readily admits, your healthcare will be between the state and healthcare professionals—professionals who themselves will be regulated by government!

Don’t be suckered by the “efficiency” argument. Our current system is loaded with government-enforced bureaucratic inefficiency, but it is shifted to the hamstrung private sector. The only proven, moral “system” to efficiently deliver products/services and control costs is the natural incentives of a free market; consumers seeking the best value for their dollars from providers, governed by the profit motive, freely competing for consumers’ business—resulting in ever-widening affordable access to healthcare across the great mass of people. The opposite, “free” healthcare for all, results in exploding costs which government struggles to contain, resulting in “death panels” dictating who can get what healthcare and when. The discipline of the profit motive is the real cost reducer, provided we have a free market. Without that discipline, where’s the restraint? There is none, as Medicare’s unfunded liability proves. What’s left? The government’s rationing guns.

Don’t be suckered by demonization of insurance companies. The insurance industry has been crippled by government regulation and cronyism, and is not indicative of insurance in a free market. Private insurers in a free, unregulated market can’t dictate terms, because consumers can say “no” and bring their business elsewhere. Try saying no to government, which has the power of the gun—of law.

“Medicare-for-All” has been waiting in the wings ever since ObamaCare’s passage. It is the final assault to consolidate complete government control. We must repel it. We have now reached the end game we have been heading for for 80 years, and we must make the choice that has been implicit in every political battle over healthcare policy—freedom or slavery; immoral healthcare or moral healthcare; total government control or a fully free market based on individual rights in medicine; socialism or capitalism.

The government has had its chance at controlling healthcare, and it has failed. The solution is to respect the rights of individuals to make their own healthcare decisions and be responsible for their own healthcare needs, including how they spend their money, contract with insurers and doctors, and who, when, and in what capacity to assist others in need. Eliminate all health insurance mandates and legal barriers to competition; phase out the tax-created, employer based health insurance favoritism; phase out and eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, and other forced wealth redistribution schemes; end remaining government regulations, mandates, and subsidies relating to and interfering in healthcare decision-making for providers and consumers; strengthen and step up enforcement of laws for policing markets against fraud.  

The government’s proper job is not to guarantee everyone healthcare—there is no “right” to healthcare that others must be forced to provide—but to secure the rights of each citizen to pursue healthcare according to her own judgement and in voluntary association and agreement between providers and consumers. Kaper-Dale clarifies the fundamental crossroad we are at. There is no escaping it. The time for half measures and compromise is over. The choice is clear: our freedom and individual rights, or all corralled under legal rule by a healthcare aristocracy forcibly financed with our own money.

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Medicare-for-all is currently taking a back seat in the healthcare debate between ObamaCare and its alleged Republican replacement. At this writing, the Republicans are flubbing the chance to move majorly toward a free market: Indeed, they rarely talk about free market healthcare and what it would mean, especially morally.

But make no mistake: total government control of healthcare, via single payer, is waiting in the wings. This may be the last chance to reverse the 50+ year tide of increasing problems of healthcare cost and paralysis associated with growing government interference, euphemistically called “improvements in coverage for Americans.” We are approaching the day when a majority of Americans, tiring of the never-ending political fight over healthcare, will throw in the towel and give up complete control to government, without ever knowing that it is precisely the politicization of medicine that is the problem—and that a complete separation of medicine and state leading to free market, individual rights-based healthcare is the only alternative to today’s mess. A Republican collapse on the issue, or a bad replacement, will pave the way for that eventuality.

Related Reading:

American Healthcare's Great and Powerful Oz

Get Ready for the Coming Post-ObamaCare Battle

Update On the "Mother-of-All-Healthcare" Battles

As ObamaCare Failures Pile Up, Get Ready for the Mother-of-All Healthcare Battles

The Left's False Alternative on Health Care

The Elephant ‘Suggests’ Free Market, Not Single Payer, Healthcare

Florio’s Misleading Take on Insurance and Pre-Existing Conditions

Recently, former New Jersey governor James Florio critiqued a key element in the Republican AHCa plan to revise ObamaCare. The GOP would replace ObamaCare’s individual and pre-existing condition mandates with a separate state-level insurance pool for people with pre-existing conditions. Republicans say that, by separating the small percentage of pre-existing conditions from the rest of the insurance market, general insurance rates will fall substantially.

But Florio observes that NJ has already tried this so-called “assigned risk” pool in its auto insurance market, and argues that the approach failed and was eventually done away with.

That’s all debatable. But what caught my eye was the following statement from his article, which is titled Gov. Florio: GOP's high-risk insurance pools makes same mistake as 'bad driver' scheme:

The deficiency in these devices is that they are not insurance. The concept of insurance is the sharing and spreading of risk. The high-risk pool is about insurers avoiding risk -- the off-loading of risk onto someone else.

In the current case, it would be taxpayers.

I think it’s very important to understand what insurance is and is not. Socialized medicine-oriented statists always attempt to frame an issue in socialist/collectivist terms. In my view, that’s what Florio is doing here in his critique of Republicans. Florio also endorses so-called “essential benefits” mandates, which is a way of redistributing wealth through “sharing and spreading of risk.”

I offered my view in these comments:

This is highly misleading.

First of all, risk-sharing is not the essential purpose. I don’t buy car or homeowners insurance to subsidize others. I buy it for personal financial protection. The primary purpose of insurance is as a financial tool for protecting against unforeseen, catastrophic future expenses. Insurance enables a consumer to arrange for such payments in the event one happens. That’s what my premiums pay for—not a chance to dump the cost of my risk on others. Insurance, properly understood, is a personal financial planning tool, not a gimmick to escape from the personal moral obligation to be responsible for one’s own health care. For insurance to work, insurers must be free to objectively assess risk and charge each customer accordingly, in a competitive environment (which, thanks to legal restrictions, we don’t now have).

Insurance is not for the purpose of redistributing wealth. Florio says assigned risk pools “offload” risk to taxpayers. But ObamaCare does the same thing, in different form. It “offloads risk” on all others through artificially higher premiums on health insurance, as well as through taxpayer subsidies to insurance companies, to subsidize “pre-existing conditions” and other mandates that enable some people to escape higher premiums based on the higher risk they pose or the choices they make.

If the GOP plan is wrong, so is ObamaCare. So is any scheme that is essentially forced wealth redistribution. Whether we’re talking about the ACA and the AHCA, which uses “private” companies, or single payer, which bypasses the private sector, we’re not talking about real insurance. We’re talking about forced “sharing and spreading of risk,” a fancy word for forced redistribution of wealth—which is legalized theft and thus fundamentally immoral and contrary to the proper purpose of government, which is to protect individual rights, including rights to spend our own money as we judge best.

It’s funny that Florio should accuse Republicans of getting people "priced out of the market” in the same breath that he endorses government-mandated “essential services, like maternal care” being forced on insurers and consumers. It is such mandates that substantially drives up the general cost of health insurance—thus making insurance unaffordable for many more people. Neither the federal nor state governments have any moral right to dictate health insurance policy provisions, aside from laws that forbid fraud, breach-of-contract, and the like. Thanks to decades of government interference, we’ve arrived at the ultimate absurdity—”unaffordable” health insurance, at 18%+ of GDP, and at a substantial cost to our freedom and individual rights in healthcare!

Related Reading:

Replacing ObamaCare Should Mean Replacing Government Planning With Individual Planning

The Road To Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Pre-existing Conditions—Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions - Part 2

The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions - Part 3

How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability, Dr. Paul Hsieh for The Objective Standard

Real vs. Our Pseudo Health Insurance