Snake-oil salesmen always lie
By Henry Lamb
August 24, 2009
It's true, there is no health plan; there is only a dream. Obama and his socialist cronies dream about a 100% government-run health care system. This is socialism in its purest form. Once heath care is taken over by the government, other segments of the economy will fall more easily.
Obama is quick to say publicly that he doesn't want to take over health care; he wants to lower costs by increasing competition. Obama said he didn't want to take over GM, but he did. He said he didn't want to take over financial institutions, but he did. Snake-oil salesmen always lie. Obama is a master snake-oil salesman.
There is no health plan. Congress is in the process of creating a health plan. Obama wanted a health plan before the August recess, but it didn't happen. The bills that are now floating around in Congress contain various proposals for elements to be included in the health plan.
A year ago, while campaigning, Obama said
Rather than try to design his own system, Obama described his dream, and left the actual construction up to his Congress-cronies. The collapse of the Clinton health care plan is still too vivid a memory for most of the congressional socialists. What emerged from Congress is something called a "public option."
A public option is a government-run insurance program said to keep private insurance firms honest by creating effective competition. A government-run public option:
Gets its start-up capital from tax revenue;
Needs not comply with state or local regulations;
Pays no state or local taxes;
Is priced specifically to sell for less than private competition; not to cover costs and make a profit for shareholders;
Can subsidize losses by simply taking more taxes.
As Barney Frank says, this public option is "the best way to reach single payer." Employers who now provide some form of health insurance for their employees would be foolish to continue to do so. By cancelling existing coverage, employers would become eligible to sign up in the tax-subsidized government-run public option.
No private industry can compete with a government that can coerce revenue in the form of taxes.
This is precisely the argument of the socialists: eliminate the profit. Let government provide the service without a profit, and costs will be reduced for everyone.
It sounds like a reasonable argument. But it fails to recognize history and it completely ignores the benefits of competition in a free market.
Perhaps it is instructive here to review the objective of the nation's health care system. In a free market system the objective is to provide the best health care possible to the greatest number of people. In a socialist single-payer, or public-option system, the objective is to provide some service to all the people, at whatever cost it takes.
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