Stuff I Probably Made Up

I will likely take some flak for this, but today’s presidential press conference raised a few questions in my mind which led me to feel a bit critical about President Obama’s Health Care plan.

Quite frankly, I believe that Obama’s rhetoric is a bit overreaching and misrepresents fears about the effect of his policies on private insurers.

At one point, President Obama mockingly claimed that free market advocates shouldn’t be alarmed about this because we believe private alternatives are more efficient and should be able to outdo his government program if what we say is true.

I personally believe that what is being overlooked is the fact that a government health plan would not be limited by resources like private health insurance. The government does not have to operate according to the market - they have the power of taxation and deficit spending to make up for mismanagement. The result is that government health care can dramatically undercut private insurance, regardless of mismanagement or actual costs. Market viability isn’t necessary in the ways which it would be were we talking about private insurance.

The result is that government can set prices artificially low. In addition, government has advantages of scale not available to private companies. The result is that private insurance companies won’t be able to compete and will be driven under.  Many individuals will choose cheaper government insurance with wide coverage over relatively more expensive private plans.

Private insurance companies will be pushed out of business by the Obama plan. People WILL lose their existing policies and it will be the government’s fault. It is blatantly dishonest for the president to claim otherwise. The new “system” will have no market-related reasons to operate efficiently and all Americans will suffer as a result.  Taxes of all forms will have to be raised across the board.

Frankly, the idea of government being control of health care for most of the country scares me.  It gives the government a vested interest in telling us how to live.  It could potentially become a “patriotic duty” to live healthy and have all sorts of regulations put on what we do and what we eat - after all, taxpayers will have to foot the bill for our poor decisions!  Meanwhile, our healthcare system will decline, as it will have no market incentives to use its resources in the most efficient ways possible.  History has shown time and again that only free markets provide those incentives.  If we pursue single payer health care, prices to buy into insurance will no longer reflect costs.  Government programs have shown time and again that such relationships are the first to go when it puts its hands into ANYTHING.

The alternative being suggested for single payer health care is NOT “doing nothing”, as the president insinuated.  Everyone agrees that reform is absolutely essential in this area.  The most popular alternatives involve changing the degree to which the insurance “middle man” is necessary in the first place.  Some suggest eliminating the insurance middleman entirely by creating personal medical savings accounts.  I personally do not have the answers to this very complicated issue… but I think it is entirely necessary that we have a debate about all the alternatives before we allow our government to bully through legislation which will dramatically change our relationship with that government.

Discuss it here or debate it at Snarkbate!