“You lie!” shouted Joe Wilson to President Obama during his speech to the joint session of Congress. Following the political bickering, a heavy question lingered in the air: Was Joe Wilson correct? Was Obama lying to the American people about the fundamental premises behind his entire health care legislation? Can Obama expand coverage to millions of uninsured Americans and cut costs at the exact same time? Can the government compel coverage on every citizen, not increase the supply of doctors and still prevent healthcare rationing? Can the bureaucracy, that will supply “free” taxpayer subsidized services, be in any business other than the destruction of the private sector and individual control over health care choices? Has utopia been realized? Of course not.
The left offers one false vision after another, and their most egregious is that government, for the first time in the history of mankind, can lower costs. The fact that insuring 10 million new citizens will increase services and thus expand costs is inescapable. The left professes great savings through “prevention,” but they miss a crucial point: If an individual wants to take preventive action in his well-being, he is fully capable of doing so. In a free society, people who make bad health decisions will face the costs of treating resulting illnesses, and people who live healthy lives will escape them. There is no constitutional or moral justification for the government protecting individuals from their own poor choices.
Democrats lament that insurance companies need “competition” from the government in order to lower costs and improve services, when it is in fact government mandates that have created health insurance monopolies, high costs and poor services. In defiance of the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause, health insurers are not even permitted to sell across state lines. It must be understood that in a free enterprise system, the health care market naturally responds to whatever ailments are suffered on the population with new hospitals, increasing numbers of doctors and advances in technology. If the market was suddenly liberated from government regulations, over 100 existing insurance providers would be free to sell to anyone in any state. With such an explosion of new supply, costs would be driven down by the resulting competition, quality would be continuously increased and access to coverage would be vastly expanded by nature of the newly burgeoning healthcare sector. Our greatest problems are a result of governmental interference and cannot be solved by more of it.
Yet, if the superiority of free market competition, individual choice and personal responsibility is wildly self-evident, why has the left insisted on expanding the government, the perpetrator of every health care woe in America? Sadly, they do not believe in freedom or the sovereignty of the individual. They want to force you into “prevention” because they don’t trust you to do so yourself. They must cut costs because they demand that you foot the bill for other people’s failures. They further constrict the private sector because they see an opportunity to rob you of your greatest and most sacred liberty: your life. The government seeks to control your body and divest all private health choices from you and your doctor; it wishes to determine how and when you live or die. If the left is claiming their health care legislation is anything but tyranny, they are simply lying.
terribly misleading columnThis column is one of the most rightwing and misleading things I’ve read in the Nexus and the author really has no idea what he is talking about. For one thing, the author implies that this piece of legislation will not cut costs. The non-partisan CBO disagrees yet Begakis doesn’t address this. Nor does he actually seem to argue with any of the specifics of any of the congressional plans — he seems to attack a single payer or socialized system, which the president is not proposing. Not only does Begakis not seem to understand health care but… Read more »
Original Intention.
The Interstate Commerce clause does in fact say that Congress has the power "to regulate" trade between states. The framers that wrote the Constitution meant that Congress could "make regular" trade – to promote free enterprise. If a state poses a tariff on another state, for example, that is unconstitutional because it makes interstate commerce irregular and discourages free market activity. The original intention of the commerce clause was to enhance liberty, not destroy private markets.
What’s the big deal about Obama’s proposal? You can still pay too much for health insurance if want to. Let’s say that the government creates a public entity that is capable of competing with health insurance companies for business. Don’t you get suspicious when these companies cry "foul" over such proposals? This proves that these companies don’t wish to have any real competition in the marketplace that you advocate. They want a "free market" in which they dictate the terms of business where they do not have to compete with any real rivals (government, public-at-large, etc.). All this has led… Read more »
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“In a free society, people who make bad health decisions will face the costs of treating resulting illnesses, and people who live healthy lives will escape them. ”
Seriously? Are you for real?