Healthcare Reform post-passage
April 4th, 2010 | 
Author: It took me a while to finally calm down enough to say a few words about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. I think that it is a mistake. Not a catastrophe, not the end of everything, but a long-term and probably fatal mistake. It is also a perfect example of everything bad about our form of government.
“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill
Democracy in the United States is derived from the people, but it is a balance between private interests, corporate interests, and bureaucratic interests each struggling for control. Corporate interests are the most obvious, they are looking to control their environment in order to produce profits. Personal interests are the ideologically minded who wish to control the thoughts and behaviors of others. The bureaucratic interests are the natural traits within all governments to control everything.
The people are the currency, by appealing to the actions and desires of the citizenry as they pursue happiness the struggle for control is waged.
That being said, the bureaucratic interests have had the advantage though most of history and especially in the western democracies. Health reform is not about health reform, it has very little to do with patient protection, and nothing to do with affordable health care. It is about control. And the government has made a power grab.
Part 1 – The Noble Goal
The goal of affordable heath care is noble; the currently applied means will only lead to disaster. Let challenge some of the myths and reason out some of the effects.
- Affordable health care is a right. No, it isn’t. And it can’t be a right. Rights are based upon personal and group freedoms. Health care is a service and can be usurped for the common good, like public education, emergency service, and utilities — but it is not a right.
- Health care insurance companies can no longer consider pre-existing conditions. Mostly true. And all of those insured will pay higher premiums. The insurance companies are not a governmental agency that can run in the red (at least not yet).
- Health care costs will go down. That has yet to be seen, but why would they. Was tort reform addressed? No (but they did include that they think someone should do something). Were the research and developmental costs structures addressed? No. Were the shortages of health care professionals addressed? A little with loans and more governmental programs. At the same time more regulations, responsibilities, and punishments are place upon health care providers. The best and the brightest will be reconsidering participating in the health care industry — there is a lot of risk to consider.
Other than mandating that more people participate in health care insurance pools, none of the key factors that address costs were included in a 2000+ page law. And a new bureaucracy was added…those are relatively cheap. Right?
- Everyone is insured. This appears to be true (except some lucky Amish), yet passing a law to mandate that everyone get insurance is easy and doesn’t really win many kudos from me. Shoot, anyone could have thought that one up.
- The bill is revenue neutral. This is one of the most laughable. Let’s see, we collect taxes for 10 years and only have to payout for 6 years. And congress still had to cook the books to get that to work (assuming the Student Loan program was one of the ways to do that).
Here are the likely outcomes.
- Health care will attempt to become like a utility, education, or emergency services, however it will fail because those institutions can be contained by geography and the nature of the service.
- Health care costs will grow. Simply consider some of the reasons given above. It will also be a negative revenue item in our growing deficit as a country.
- The wealthy will still receive the best care available while the rest of America will experience reduced levels of service.
- A supplemental health care service industry will evolve to allow those who are not satisfied with the public option.
- Companies with abandon the “cadillac” plans much to the dismay of their current employees. They will also move away from being the primary health care insurance provider.
- Small companies will be even more effected by health care taxes as they choose to hire and expand. This will increase the cost of doing business and make even more difficult to grow.
- The burden of taxation will increase. Consider this bill as simply another payroll tax, because that is essentially what it is with the usual “no opt out clause” (again, unless you are a lucky Amish).
Becoming Amish has never looked more appealing.
- Michael
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This is were I respectfully disagree. If everybody pays into the system and everybody is insured that would control cost, if premiums are getting paid, and less cost killing unfunded ER visits or at least a lot less of them. Getting rid of pre-exisisting conditions was the right thing to do. Pre-exsisting conditions was the American version of natural selection and outdated. With the new online genetic testing that is going to be on the market in the not to distant future the pre-exsisting condition was going to kill American healthcare system. If you mail your urine sample to a lab for the profile and find the you genetically have the predisposition for high blood pressure or heart illnesses you have a pre-exsisting condition. It is now harder to get health insurance. In general since these tests would be considered to be cheap when available and expecting to attract a large number of consumers, who are interested in preventing health issues, that would put a big financial burden on those who can pay health insurance premiums, large enough to forecast a downfall of the industry in the short term.
The provision in the bill that insures annual checkups are 100% paid for also insures that preventative healthcare is a part of the solution. Finding potential issues early is a good thing and a money saver in the long run, and is less of a future burden on our Medicare system.
Small companies with less than 50 people are not effected. Poor families are exempt. People in health co-ops are exempt.
There are other benefits also. Now the wacko right was against this because they want to make sure they continue getting campaign funds from this industry. The are bought and paid for by them. If they offered to remove the anti-trust exemption that health insurance companies have in exchange of repealing the health care law then I would propably say OK. Health insurance companies where getting away with too much. With unfunded ER visits, torts issues ( I agree with you on this one), uninsured, and so many other things this was the best deal for everybody. The right should have been happy with it since major funding is still in the private market, and they presented an almost identical plan to President Clinton. The left should have been happy with alot more coverage, no pre-exsisting conditions, no policy drop outs, extended coverage, and a place for co-ops in the market. In the end people really should give this a chance before repealing it. That is my opinion with full respect for yours.