The Train Wreck That Is Obamacare

 OpenMarket.org

 At least one union that supported passage of Obamacare, is now calling for its repeal. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers has given up on salvaging the deeply-flawed health care law...

 Meanwhile, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who helped write Obamacare and is up for re-election in 2014, says he’s worried about a “huge train wreck coming” when the Obama administration begins fully implementing the health care law later this year. Baucus “sharply criticized the administration’s outreach efforts in a budget hearing on Wednesday. He told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that people and businesses ‘have no idea what to do, what to expect’ from the law.” His colleague, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., now admits the health care law is so unprecedentedly complicated as to be “just beyond comprehension” (alas, his inability to comprehend it didn’t keep him from voting to pass Obamacare).

Obamacare is strangling job creation and will harm life-saving medical innovation. Some employers have stopped hiring because of Obamacare, and others are cutting full-time workers and replacing them with part-time workers to avoid Obamacare mandates that apply to full-time employees. Obamacare caused layoffs in the medical device industry through what a liberal Senator conceded was a “job-killing tax” that will “impair American competitiveness in the medical device field.” Obamacare will cut employment by an additional 800,000 because of work disincentives and bizarre income-cliffs.

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Orlando's moonbat congressman, Alan Grayson, wants to throw even more money down the Medicare rat hole:

"Congressman Alan Grayson, D-Fla., today introduced a bill (H.R. 4789) which would give the option to buy into Medicare to every citizen of the United States. The Public Option Act, also known as the Medicare You Can Buy Into Act, would open up the Medicare network to anyone who can pay for it.

Congressman Grayson said, Obviously, America wants and needs more competition in health coverage, and a public option offers that. But its just as important that we offer people not just another choice, but another kind of choice. A lot of people don't want to be at the mercy of greedy insurance companies that will make money by denying them the care that they need to stay healthy, or to stay alive. We deserve to have a real alternative."

Well, it's easy to compete when you can operate at a perpetual, taxpayer funded loss and are making all the rules. Medicare is not only broke, but suffers from levels of fraud that would put any private insurer out of business, which is the ultimate goal of all these harebrained schemes.

Additionally, the government already accounts for around 50% of the health care system and the losses from its underpayments to doctors and hospitals are shifted to private insurers.


And you would think an industry that's so "greedy" would do a better job of ripping us off:

"According to the most recent Fortune 500 rankings, health insurers are not even among the top-30 United States industries in profit-margin. Health insurers rank 35th, with a profit-margin of just 2.2 percent — less than one-fifth the profit-margin of railroads. None of the ten largest American health insurers made profits of more than 4.5 percent, and two of them lost money. Health insurers’ collective profit-margin is less than one-eighth that of drug companies and less than one-seventh that of companies that sell medical products or equipment. It’s also less than that of medical facilities. Yet when was the last time you heard President Obama rail against greedy hospitals?

The combined profits of America’s ten largest health insurers are $8.3 billion. That’s less than two-thirds of the profits of Wal-Mart alone, less than half of the profits of General Electric alone, and less than one-seventh of what Medicare loses each year to fraud. Health insurers collectively have one-eighth the profit-margin of McDonald’s or Coke, one-ninth that of eBay, and one-fifteenth that of Merck."

Moving more people into a government system will shift more costs to a dwindling private insurance pool, resulting in even higher premiums or destructive losses that will eventually kill the private health care industry. With no one left to stick with these inefficiencies, they will paid for with higher taxes and reduced or denied care.

Then we are left no choice and have to rely on the tender mercies of the anointed in government who proclaim themselves immune from ordinary human failings, as they are possessed with unique wisdom and virtue.

Health Care a Right?

With his usual clarity, Walter Williams breaks down the real difference between negative and positive rights:

"...Say a person, let's call him Harry, suffers from diabetes and he has no means to pay a laboratory for blood work, a doctor for treatment and a pharmacy for medication. Does Harry have a right to XYZ lab's and Dr. Jones' services and a prescription from a pharmacist? And, if those services are not provided without charge, should Harry be able to call for criminal sanctions against those persons for violating his rights to health care?

You say, "Williams, that would come very close to slavery if one person had the right to force someone to serve him without pay." You're right.

Suppose instead of Harry being able to force a lab, doctor and pharmacy to provide services without pay, Congress uses its taxing power to take a couple of hundred dollars out of the paycheck of some American to give to Harry so that he could pay the lab, doctor and pharmacist. Would there be any difference in principle, namely forcibly using one person to serve the purposes of another?...

...True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. That means exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another. In other words, my rights to speech or travel impose no obligations on another except those of noninterference.

If we apply ideas behind rights to health care to my rights to speech or travel, my free speech rights would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with an auditorium, television studio or radio station. My right to travel freely would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with airfare and hotel accommodations.

For Congress to guarantee a right to health care, or any other good or service, whether a person can afford it or not, it must diminish someone else's rights, namely their rights to their earnings...

Defining What You "Need"

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." -- Karl Marx, 1875

"It's a tax on insurance companies that offer Cadillac, or quite frankly, Rolls Royce policies that in essence people don't need." -- Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs, 2-25-10

The day after Pres. Obama carped about people calling him a socialist, he sent his top spokesman out to describe a plan to tax health insurance policies that provide benefits more generous than what people "need."...MORE

And that's exactly what socialism, or statism if you prefer, does. Obama is either ignorant of what those terms mean or he thinks we are. Since he's been marinating in collectivist philosophy his entire life, my guess is it's the latter.

When they say your insurance policy covers more than what you "need", what they really mean is that your ability to buy that policy is unfair to those who can't. Therefore, you must be forced to relinquish some of your property to the state in order to satisfy the never ending needs of others and atone for the economic crime of being successful.

What else will the government tax that they decide is more than you need? Your house, food, computer, clothes...your Cadillac? And as the government gets bigger and the individual smaller, the "needs" of everyone gets defined downward as incentives shrivel and the economy stagnates.

Computers And The Government Free Market

A Tech Retrospective from PC world shows us the remarkable advances in computer technology relative to price. Beyond the wow factor it also shows us how free markets not only give us better products, but at a lower price as well. Profit driven competition in the technology industry, unfettered by government intervention has created jobs, wealth and higher standards of living for billions throughout the world. It has also saved countless lives through further innovation these products have inspired.

Compare this to the inefficient and broken Health Care and Education industries. Government meddling and the demonization of private sector participants has resulted in skyrocketing costs with little or no corresponding increase in value. And what do Hillary and Obama propose as solutions? More government fixes to government created problems.

All markets, free or not are subject to the Laws of Supply and Demand. Not the Theory or Suggestion, but the law. Like the Laws of Gravity, ignore them and disaster will be the result.