Posted by rbunce on 07/15/09
Last updated 07/15/09

I am sure you have heard the Democrats talking back and forth about who’s Universal Health Care is best and who is going to give more to hard working Americans. But just stop and think for a minute what happens to things when big government gets involved. Remember the federal government created HMOs in 1973.

The basic business model of all HMO's is to deny people treatments which they deem as unnecessary, in order to increase profits, which is pure evil. Instead the model should be centered around the doctor. A doctors basic business model benefits by helping the most people, which increases profits. Now keep this in mind as you read about Universal Health Care.

Universal Health Care would be a dream come true for the drug and insurance industries. This may seem counter intuitive but once the system is in place, the drug companies will have guaranteed income. Once the contracts between the government and drug companies are setup, no new drug companies will be able to exist. This will allow drug companies to charge anything they want with a guarantee that it will be paid. The federal government will have no choice, either give Americans no health care or pay the ransom to the drug companies.

On the insurance industry end, it will be lobbied and setup so that instead of the government paying the hospitals directly. The government will pay the insurance premiums to an insurance company, which will pay hospitals; this is called single payer insurance.

This will give the insurance companies a guaranteed income, and at the same time they will be able to slowly buy the hospitals. Once they have a large enough percentage of them, they will be able to ransom the government as well. They can begin charging whatever they want for services, and again the government will have no choice. The federal government can either let the people die or pay the ransom.

Unfortunately this will not be the worst part of Universal Health Care. When new treatments are discovered, the doctors and patients will not be able take a chance on them. Instead these treatments will have to go through the "bureaucrats gauntlet of red tape" to get to the people who need them to survive, which will take years and years. So by the time they are available to be used, it will be too late for thousands of Americans.

With Universal Health Care, everyone pays the maximum because the money is guaranteed through government intervention, which is funded by the people’s taxes,  through force, by  the IRS. No matter how the picture for this is painted, this is the plan. This is how big government sells things, sugar coating cyanide pills. Sweet to taste, but by the time the people swallow it, it is way too late.

Instead we can choose freedom! Health Care should be between a patient and their doctor. Prices for a doctor's services should be controlled by the doctors, so a sliding scale can be implemented, the poor can pay what they can, while the rich can pay more to provide for those without. Also all treatments will be available, and their uses will be up to the patient and the doctor to decide. True Freedom, is the ability to make your own decisions!

Posted 07/16/09 Haystacks Calhoun NEW YORK, NY

Seeing how the government runs the post office and Amtrak makes me very wary of government involvement in health insurance.

Posted 07/16/09 jtfische w, MO

The only time the government should step into health insurance is to protect people from abuses. Not build up an industry that abuses people to death (literally). This is corporatism at its worst.

Posted 09/13/09 jfhobbs Spring Creek, NV

This is far from the scope of enumerated powers and contrary to the economic principals ingrained within the constitution. Then again so is what we are doing now, it is what has drove up the price and killed the quailty of healthcare in the first place. We cannot solve the problem caused by intervention with more intervention.

Posted by rbunce on 07/15/09

A fiat system like the federal reserve is not inherently evil, but a projection of it's controllers. If they are just the system will be just, but if they are not, the system will not be. This is much the same way a monarchy is not inherently evil. It is dependent on the King or Queen.

But this is not a system that can withstand generational changes, the power will be respected by some generations of rulers while abused by others.
So this is why it must be rejected on the basis that every aspect of a persons life should not be decided by so few. A few whose mood can easily change. Under this system true freedom can never happen because everything in our life can be manipulated through arbitrary changes in monetary policy decided by those who will never feel the pains caused by the changes.

Instead in a commodity based currency we would be ruled by an inanimate object. Incapable of greed or injustice, steady in it's judgment whether it be today or in a hundred years.

Posted by rbunce on 07/15/09

I measure freedom by the total number of choices an individual has in his or her life. Being that, whenever government creates a program or institution that makes a choice for us, it is taking a choice from us. so government is also taking a piece of our freedom.
Instead of education to inspire change as it would be in a free society, government gives no choice to the people in the changes it institutes. As if a hammer it's desires are raised above yours and you are hammered into the ground for disagreeing with their interventions. To me freedom is less about what you can do and more about what you can choose not to do.

Posted by rbunce on 07/15/09

Bills in Washington are very often put forth to help children, the poor, or some unfortunate group. The thing is though, if you take a look at Washington it is filled with hundreds of groups to petition congress to help those they represent. These groups are there to buy congressmen and senators, even going so far as to write the bills for them to submit. But out of all these groups, there are not any that represent the children or the poor. So to believe anything coming out of Washington is for the children or the poor is at best naive.

What comes from passing a program is a committee that is setup to decide how best to run the program. This leads to branch offices being setup for the program, each of these needing to be staffed. Then usually a research period is started to refine what it is that the program needs to do. Around this time one of the groups that helped create the bill now offers their services to help the program, after the infrastructure for it has already been built.

So now that group has guaranteed work without having to do research, advertising, building a base of customers, or even determining if the program will work. This is the beauty part, because the ones that determine whether the program is working are the committees or office workers that came into existence with the program. So no matter what, the program is an overwhelming success and to be even better all they need is more money.

In a free market the group that created the bill would have had to actually sell people on the program and on top of that, take a chance it would fail, and lose the entire investment. Instead they can invest money into congressmen and force the American public to buy their product whether they want it or not.

This is nothing new to the world, it was done to the colonist when companies like the East India Trading Company petitioned the crown to force the colonists to buy things indirectly through taxes.

This is directly why the constitution limits exactly what congress can spend money on. It is not the lobbyist who corrupt the system, they are merely a symptom of the problem. It is the congress being aloud to ignore the constitution and spend the people's money outside the agreement between the people and government, that is the constitution. We must remind them it is not their's to spend.

More centralized government does not create equality, instead it transfers inequality from choices and decision made by individuals in the free market to whether you are politically well connected or not. As long as decisions are made in Washington that choose who wins and who loses, the lobbyists will always exist to make sure they are not the losers.

Posted by rbunce on 07/15/09

The fallacy of central planning is this, when everything in a society is chosen by a core group, the key to success is then to please that core group, not society as a whole. Innovation and hard work are ignored, while bribery and cronyism is rewarded.
Further more when it is deemed that a certain industry or part of society should be improved, the only answer a centrally planned society has to offer is throwing money at it. But in the same way as when money is given to a child for not doing any work, this money will have no value, it won't stand for any real world event that earned it, it becomes taken for granted that the money will be there no matter what is done. So the end effect of subsidizing something is creating an imaginary market. Further more as a side effect, a child like dependency is created in industries that become reliant on free money to function because they have artificially grown larger than what the market would have normally aloud. This inevitable sets the industry up for a depression when the central planners no longer favor that industry or can no longer support it.

In a free market, what is rewarded is innovation and hard work, we see this in young industries that have yet to have the tentacles of government wrapped around them such as computer hardware and software; and the fashion industry. In these industries you can become a power house over night, and lose everything just as fast, this is the essence of the free market. Continuous improvements must be made to stay competitive in a free market, and once at the top you can not rest on your lorals for long before an upstart challenges your position. This competition improves all of society, not just favored group