Winning the healthcare debate
May 23, 2009It looks like Obama is ready to force yet another giant piece of legislation through that will affect all of our lives dramatically before anyone really knows what the bill contains. This time the industry he is targeting is our private health care system, which accounts for about 17% of the GDP of the US. He is planning to move towards a Canadian or European socialized health care model better known as a “single payer system”, meaning that our private health insurance industry is replaced with one payer, the federal government. The first step will be to introduce a publicly-funded insurance plan that will be crafted to drive private insurers out of business due to unfair competition. It’s the same playbook…manufacture a crisis, then ”solve” it with big government. In order to avoid this, several large industry players such as big-pharma, the American Medical Association and the health insurance industry have colluded with Obama in an attempt to have a voice in the debate.
Unfortunately, whenever the government gets together with industry giants to craft sweeping “reform” legislation, without anyone representing the consumers (or in this case patients), you know who’s going to get the shaft. The GOP preemptively released their version of a reform plan this week entitled the “Patient’s Choice” plan. It maintains a market based, private insurance system managed at the state level and is paid for pre-tax, and includes a variety of reforms and changes that benefit the patient. The bill’s intent is to take the patient’s side in this fight to avoid citizens being forced into a government healthcare bureaucracy. This presents us with a great opportunity to work together to save the private health care industry from an Obama takeover. It’s not often that the GOP can take a populist stance that also is good for the free market. It wont be easy though, Democrats have demonized the current health care system quite effectively. Additionally, Republicans have been shills to insurance companies in the past, making it difficult to come out now in favor of patient’s rights.
The healthcare debate is going to dominate the news this summer and it will be a great opportunity for the GOP to unite around a simple common theme- keep Obama’s thugocracy away from our health care!
JR
May 26, 2009
The health care debate has been jumbled into sound bites too often, which has led to a lot of misunderstanding about the problem and proposed “solutions.” But there is no doubt there needs to be a solution (just look at the impact health insurance costs have had on the auto industry), and you rightly point out that a GOP victory on this would help us greatly at the ballot box.
Overall, there are two pieces, I would suggest, to the problem: the high cost of health CARE (going to the doctor, hospital, etc.) and the high cost of health INSURANCE – obviously, the latter as affected greatly by the former.
I think health care is a rather simple solution that, generally both parties seem to agree on. America has the best medical care in the world, and we need to help bring down costs while maintaining the current quality and competition in the system. This can be begun through introducing market driven incentives for efficiency. The next step is to get people insured. A massive driver of high health care costs is the fact that the consumer absorbs the cost of people who cannot pay for care that they receive.
The other side of the coin is to lower the cost of insurance. As I suggested above, cheaper insurance means more people insured, which means cheaper health care, which means cheaper insurance, etc…There is potentially a significant multiplier effect. The approach to this measure, though, is a bit more complicated. I think Mitt Romney was onto something from a cost perspective in Mass – mandated universal insurance is a simple solution. But we, as conservatives, should always be wary of government mandates.
Then there is the Democrat proposal of a “public option” – essentially allowing anyone to buy into Medicare. Again, we – as conservatives – should always be wary of government involvement.
So, the last option is a free market incentive – competition. We often hear the suggestion of being able to buy insurance across state lines – force companies to compete on cost. Though, we still have inherent flaws in this: a) presently, insurance is regulated state by state, and this could create a consumer protection nightmare and b) health insurance companies, though productive, already have narrow thin profit margins. It would be hard to imagine them lowering cost too much without a Wal-Mart of the health insurance world emerging and taking over (maybe not a bad thing from a cost perspective).
So, where do we go from here? In my personal opinion, there is no universal solution to this problem without federal government intervention. And as a conservative, I don’t want the government telling me what I have to buy or how to look after my health. It’s a Catch-22. We damn ourselves on principle if we do, and the voters damn us at the ballot box if we don’t…decisions, decisions.