We Must End Gov’t Bias Towards Employer-Provided Health Coverage

When nobody is paying attention to an issue, liberals swoop in and impose a pernicious regulation or mandate on a private industry

While I certainly agree with that comment, I’m not sure they are the sole culprits as regards larded up healthcare policies.

It is my understanding that various pressure groups [accupuncturists, professional counselors, chiropractors] have lobbied state governments to make sure their profession gets represented in the mandate gravy train.

As one who purchases their own health insurance [plus spouse], these mandates plus all the “free” stuff from Obamacarre have forced premiums to rocket up quite nicely over the last few years.  And none of it contributes to my basic objective for having health insurance [hedging against financial ruin through castatrophic medical issues].

The statists (of all parties) set up the scheme, #1, and that puts them at the center of every “solution” afterward when their schemes don’t pan out.  It’s really a political analog to bloodletting:  When leeches fail to cure the ailing patient, more leeches are applied.  The answer is always more leeches.

Leeches.  I love the analogy and the symbolism.  Leeches sucking blood from the host until the host dies.

Need to the tell the Romney campaign.  The 47% are the leaches on the 50% who are the producers.  Let too many leeches latch onto the producing host and you kill the host.

Then the leeches die. 

Yep, love the symbolism

One frequent proposal from reformers is to create an individual tax credit for health insurance. If there is some social benefit to subsidized health insurance, then it should be available to everyone, not just those privileged to have a good job.

Pace, Roland,

Tax credits, if operated in a fiscally sound manner, are neither more nor less than redistribution of wealth from those who are well-off and healthy to those who are neither well-off nor healthy. Although, I am glad to see that you do have a very good point about government making any of its benefits equally available to every citizen & legal resident. That is one, if not the, key component of the Rule of Law.

But in the final analysis, there is one, and only one, solution to the issue of rising healthcare costs. To understand why that is so one must understand some history. The problem of those rising costs is socialism (of the flavor most commonly identified with a certain Italian leader of the political party which ruled Italy from 1922 until 1943). For anyone reading who is too young to be familiar with that era, the party in question used an image of old Roman symbol of office that was found on the reverse side of the U.S. coin which is most commonly referred to as the “Liberty head” or “Mercury dime”, the obverse side showing the Liberty head. That Roman symbol consists of a bundle of sticks bound around the shaft of an axe. The Latin name for that symbol was fasces. The political party to which I refer took the name “Fascist” in reference to the symbol. Economists often refer to the economic system of fascism as corporatism, but it is, in fact simply a subspecies of socialism. In corporatism, the government does not take open control of private businesses by appointing the corporate leadership, but by imposing rules, regulations, quotas and controls on them.

Thus, what those of you posting on this thread are identifying as problems, that is the rules and regulations that require or prohibit specific terms of coverage in health insurance are simply the outward evidence of the fact that healthcare coverage in the U.S. is not, in any sense of the term, a free market.

And what is required in order for healthcare insurance to be available is precisely what it is not now, to wit, a free market (with its attendant preconditions, namely, strict government adherence to the Rule of Law, accompanied by strict government protection of the rights of private property, free association and free exchange). Absent those four preconditions, we simply will not have a free market in healthcare coverage, or healthcare coverage of any type, including via insurance.

The other bad news is that the way in which we arrived in our present state of affairs, which is that the vast majority of people who have healthcare coverage do not have healthcare insurance, rather they have pre-paid healthcare. If we had actuarial insurance, we would have coverage that provides relatively generous payment for catastrophically expensive illnesses/injuries, and we would pay for routine healthcare with our own cash. That is where the market would take us.

Unfortunately,

“. . . strict government protection of the rights of private property, free association and free exchange”.

Do we still have the rights of free association and free exchange? The former has been completely nullified and the latter severely compromised by anti-discrimination laws.

Given the increasingly libertarian tendencies of this country’s youngest adults, I think it might be time to start pushing for an end to anti-discrimination laws on free-association grounds. Justice O’Connor might have started the process with her opinion that affirmative action must be regarded as temporary, not permanent.

[6] Roland,

You are absolutely correct about the steady erosion of the basic rights I listed. Those erosions are one of the biggest obstacles which must be overcome if this nation is not to descend into an increasing tyranny. A descent much fostered by the increasing pattern of indoctrination replacing education, of propaganda replacing journalism, and the list could go on.

Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer