ObamaCare vs. “SwampCare”

photo by Salon.com

Yes, ObamaCare sucks. It is unsustainable, and insurance carriers are dropping out of the exchanges left and right. So our fearless leaders in the swamp feel compelled to replace one failing top-heavy government program, ObamaCare, with another. I call it SwampCare.

Unfortunately, in their effort to grind out a replacement plan, our leaders keep bumping into an unfortunate truth: in a free market some people will get more stuff than others.

I’m not saying that health care should not be available to everybody. I’m just saying that in the real world you can’t drive a Cadillac if you ain’t got no money, honey.

Today the Sunday news talking heads were breathlessly grilling Paul Ryan and Reince Preibus over how many people will needlessly die because they have stripped the ObamaCare “pre-existing conditions” feature from their new health insurance bill. The swamp boys fell all over themselves denying it. “No! SwampCare will cover everybody for everything all the time, and costs will go down! Trust us, we’re the government!”

Yeah, right. And it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime. (That’s a musical allegory for both of you readers who are under age 60).

Covering pre-existing conditions without requiring continuity of coverage is like wrecking your car and then buying a policy to get it repaired. It is certainly not insurance (shared risk). And the whole discussion is pointless anyway, as long as health care providers are required by law to take care of patients regardless of their coverage, ability to pay, or even citizenship. The mandate requiring everybody to buy insurance is unAmerican, if not unconstitutional. So is requiring a doctor to care for a patient without any compensation for this work.

Adult Americans know there is no such thing as a free lunch. But most politicians promise it anyway. They don’t dare take away the guarantee of insurance coverage for people who are uninsured and have a pre-existing condition. But somebody has to pay the freight. Both ObamaCare and SwampCare pass the cost on to the taxpayers; the former through premium subsidies, and the latter through funding assigned-risk pools.

ObamaCare, a product of the nouveau-left, is all about fairness, so it requires young people to buy policies and pay higher premiums to subsidize the high-cost old timers. The designers of SwampCare think that’s terrible. So their solution is to have seniors pay a little bit higher premiums, and stick the rest of the cost difference on the taxpayers via subsidized tax credits.

Every time government sticks its nose into private industry trying to make things “fair” the market is distorted and everything gets screwed up. And while Nancy Pelosi dreams of an America dotted with gleaming white government health care centers, stuffed with highly-paid Democrat-voting unionized health care employees, we all know the two reasons why PelosiCare could never work: 1) big government can’t do anything right 2) we couldn’t afford it even if it could.

By the miracle of free markets, most of us have access to great cars, reliable refrigerators, skilled veterinarians, safe and inexpensive food, and internet service that gets better by the second. The best healthcare system in the world was developed in this free-market environment with minimal government intervention. Churches and charities played a large role, and families took responsibility for their own destinies. People expected to pay for their own health care, just as they paid for their own food and housing. At one time it all just worked for most Americans.

We all want everybody to have the best health care possible. But can everybody have CadillacCare? Realistically, no. Instead of destroying the health care system for everybody with experimental regulations and laws, why not let the free market work its miracle for most of us and concentrate on how to provide adequate care via public clinics and hospitals for those who fall outside margins?

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side