Call your Senators, Write your Congressmen
The sovietization of the American health care system, currently the best in the world, soon to be on par with that of Yugoslavia, continues without effective opposition by the Republican Party leadership.
One or two Republicans have spoken out, but there is no strategy, no coordinated effort to stop this monster.
It is not as if the defenders of the bill even have the slightest idea what they are talking about, or what they are voting into place. Your representatives in Congress, dear voters, have not read this thousand-page bill any more than they read the bill for the stimulus package: so while hacks for Big Brother continue to claim that private insurers will not be crowded out of the market, Investor’s Business Daily reports that on page 16 of the bill there is a provision which will make private insurance illegal.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
Only if you, dear voter, take the time and effort to call or write to your representatives is there any chance of derailing this juggernaut.
The purpose of this legislation, no matter what it supporters say, is not to lower your health care costs. Their purpose is permanent control over your decisions. They want a trillion dollars industry under their control. I would not be surprised to find out they want to ration the care by race and minority categories, like college admissions, by quotas. They want to be in a position to reward their friends and punish their enemies. They want to put in place a permanent bureaucracy, permanently loyal to them, so that the Dems will be running the country no matter who wins or loses elections.
Sound paranoid? Perhaps. But I cannot shake the suspicion that, if its supporters really wanted to lower health care costs, they would look at the chain of cause and effect, look at the problem, and direct their attention to the causes of the problem. They would at least have a Freshman Econ 101 level of knowledge as to what sets the height of prices for goods and services.
If the mechanic never once looks under the hood, you can be damn sure he does not really want to fix the car engine. If all he does is ask you for your car keys, and tell you to sit in the back, but gives you no honest answer when you ask him why, you can be damn sure the mechanic is really after one thing: he wants you out of the driver’s seat. He wants to take you for a ride.
Nothing even remotely like a rational analysis is being done, either by the administration, their chattering fellow travelers in the media, or even among the private opinions of those who support this bill.
Instead the Administration talks nonsense, on the order of: "We will lower taxes while increasing government services without running up the national debt!" The politicians promise “If you like your private insurance you can keep it; if you don’t like it, we provide you another option; if you currently have no option, we will provide one for you.” Well, well. How generous with our children’s money you are being. Why not follow the wise policies of His Most Catholic Majesty Fruvous Moxy , king of Spain, make Friday part of the weekend, and give every new baby a chocolate eclair?
Providing public health insurance will crowd out private insurance, and even if the competition between a publicly-subsidized market and a private market does not kill off the private market, the government tightly regulate the private health insurance market now, and can simply render the publicly-subsidized insurers immune from any regulations or immune from lawsuits, which can target the private market to strangle and destroy it. Price controls cause shortages, and shortages provoke calls for additional price controls.
Eventually public policy decision will force economization of the limited public funds: expensive procedures and drugs will be denied those an actuarial tables says may die soon anyway: Grandma will be given morphine rather than expensive anti-cancer treatments, and accountants in Washington will be required by ordinary prudence to contemplate the cost-effectiveness of euthanasia.
Come now: let us reason together. If Medicaid and Medicare actually lowered costs, improved service, or provided more abundantly than private medicine, why do those on these programs inevitably purchase supplemental private insurance? Why are ever more doctors and hospitals refusing Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement? If it is such a great system, why is it failing? Since it is failing system, why are we contemplating expanding it to cover everyone?
Write or call. Do it today. Make your voices heard, I beg you.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
