Southern Bread

#1. Politicians lie. Healthcare “reform” is not about healthcare, and it’s not about reform. A politician’s number one job is to get re-elected. His number two job is to get other politicians re-elected so that they will do things to help him get re-elected. It’s as simple as that. Nothing, and I mean nothing else matters to them. This healthcare legislation has only one goal: to put the Democrat party into perpetual power by adding an ultimate trump card to their playbook. From now on they will be able to acuse any opposition of wanting to “tinker with” or “take away” your healthcare. Just like Republicans try to set up scenarios where they can claim that you will be “less safe” under Democrat leadership. No legislation is about the content. It’s about getting votes. Therefore, it doesn’t matter one iota what Obama said in his stupid speech. He will say anything it takes to get what he wants.

#2. This speed is strategic. The question you could as yourself after reading number one is a logical one: why, if this is all about re-election, would Democrats be willing to pass a bill with such obvious backlash? The answer to that question makes everything that’s going on right now make sense when you think about it. Passing this healthcare horror bill only makes strategic vote buying sense if you pass it quickly(i.e. before the end of the year), and then delay the bad parts until after 2012(Obama’s next election year). What this would do is get this thing on the books quickly enough so that voters will forget about it before November of 2010 when mid-term elections happen. Since 90% of this bill won’t even kick into effect until 2013, that then gives Obama plenty of time to say “see, I told you nothing bad would happen and you wouldn’t lose your doctor, blah, blah.” But then, as the program kicks in during 2013-2016 people will get sucked into the system. By the time 2016 rolls around it will be perfect time to play the “Republicans want to take away your free healthcare” card. It’s this long term strategy that is being mulled over by every Democrat congressman on capitol hill at the moment. If they gamble on it working they’ll vote yes.

#3. Name a government program you prefer over it’s private counterpart. Name me one government service that you think is superior to it’s private sector counterpart. You can’t. Government sucks at everything it does. We’ve talked about this time and again. Government is inherently incapable of responding correctly to consumer needs. Market feedback, and specifically the price mechanism, is what makes private companies function. When you break those things or take them away you get nothing but a broken market sector. Just like FedEx and UPS run rings around the Post Office, private insurance companies run rings around Medicare and Medicaid. I had a friend who said it took two years for his mother to get approved for Medicaid. In contrast, I was signed onto Blue Cross within a day of arriving at my current job, sight unseen and only filled out one form. Why, in God’s name, would anyone want to give that up for a horribly broken Government plan.

#4. The public option doesn’t matter. Well, of course it matters. But what I’m saying is that it isn’t somehow the lynchpin that will make it all acceptable if it’s just removed. The rest of this bill places all kinds of new regulations on private insurers that will cause premiums to skyrocket. Even the one thing that looks acceptable on the surface – the portability portion – isn’t going to work right with the way the market has been tampered with. You would think that allowing people to buy insurance across state lines would increase competition and bring down premiums. The problem is that insurers have these little state mini-monopolies for a reason. They’ve negotiated these closed borders over the years in exchange for mandates. The states give these companies mandated coverage requirements and in return include closed-border provisions in return. Again, it all goes back to vote buying. The politician gets to say he’s regulating the evil insurance company while the whole time handing the insurance company a golden ticket of legalized state monopoly. If the Federal government comes in and breaks those monopoly agreements there will be a lot of companies that go out of business as they are forced to absorb the full fiscal impact of all of these mandates.

#5. Nobody has a right to the fruit of another person’s labour. I was talking with a friend the other day about the cost of a new prescription medication he is taking. It’s Nexium. He was talking about how it costs a small fortune each month. This is true of the whole medical industry as a whole. Costs in the healthcare industry have skyrocketed over the last 20 years like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s insane. The reason is government mandates, pharmaceutical patents, state insurance monopolies, etc. The solution to all the price inflation in healthcare is to get rid of those things. The solution is not to force someone to give away their labour for free. It’s easy to complain about the cost of healthcare, but we must remember that healthcare doesn’t spring out of the ground naturally. There are people attached to the healthcare industry. People that need to make a living to support their families. The same with drug companies. People work hard to come up with new drugs. It’s complicated work. Just because a certain medication saves lives doesn’t mean we have a right to force them to produce it and give it away for free. That’s called slavery.