Congress and Health Care Benefits

Whenever Congress raises the tax on tobacco, it justifies the raise--in part--because more expensive tobacco will mean fewer people using tobacco.

Now the debate is over Congress taxing health care benefits. What is it that Congress wants, fewer people having health care benefits?

Some people might actually say yes, that there is a faction that wishes for fewer people to have adequate and affordable health care coverage--the reason being that this same faction can thus justify sweeping in with its national health care plan to help solve a "crisis" that it created and gradually enhanced.

I'm sick and tired of Congress thinking that my pockets are a perfectly natural place for its hands. I want its hands out of my pockets, and I think that we would be wise to get a little archaic on them for their thievery--a constitutional amendment that limits their taxation and spending abilities. How do you stop a malicious and incorrigible pickpocket? Cut off his hands.

Eliminate Government Health Care

It seems whenever I point out the obvious flaws in socialized medicine--flaws terrible enough to eschew it forevermore rather than consider it once again (as both Republicans and Democrats are doing)--someone asks a variation of the question:

"Well, then what do you suggest as a policy to resolve the current crisis?"

The unfortunate truth is that most people who pose this question are not interested in even considering my answer; they simply retreat to it because they haven't a ready or viable defense for socialism.

There is nothing unique about what I think should be this government's health care policy. I cannot lay proprietary claim to the ideas behind my creed. To put it tersely, I think that the government should back off--back way off.

Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe recommends four easy steps in this article from The Free Market. Click on either of the link to read more of his rationale.

1. Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health care services would appear on the market.

2. Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs.

3. Deregulate the health insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example, because it is in one's own hands to bring these events about.

4. Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased breed illness and disease, and promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate them, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.

Notice the action verbs that begin each of Hoppe's recommendations. Eliminate appears three times, and deregulate (meaning to eliminate regulation). That's because, as economist Stefan Karlsson points out ,

the real shortcomings that [the U.S. health care industry] does have are not the effect of its free market elements, but to various regulations and factors unrelated to the health care system.

In fact, as Karlsson and others point out, is the socialism already inherent in the U.S. system that is the root of the problem. Currently, the government is funding nearly if not half of all medical spending in this country, "spending more per capita than any other OECD country, including those with socialist, government-funded healthcare." (click on the link to look at the graph).

So, rather than doing more of the same--if you really wish for substantive change, that is--we should try something truly different. As Hoppe suggests, let's eliminate and deregulate the things that are the very source of the "crisis."

By the way, I think that the term "crisis" is inappropriately used to identify the problem(s) with health care in the United States. A crisis would be that there are no doctors, treatments, or medicines. That costs for doctors, treatments, and medicines are too high for many is not a crisis. At best it's a predicament, and only for those who cannot affort medical goods and services. Read Hoppe's article and do a little checking around yourself, and you'll see that the cost problem is not the health care industry's fault. It's the government that needs to change.

Here's a bit of an afterthought--far too often an afterthought for most people--Government health care is unconstitutional.

I know. Who cares about the constitution anymore?

I do. (I do...I do...I do...)--that's the sound of the echo in this lonely room.

Health Care Costs

This seems to be a fairly common sentiment among those who think that the government must step in and reform the health care industry:

"Well if we don't do something about it, then pretty soon no one will be able to afford to even go see a doctor."

So you really think that bringing the government in will reign in costs?

Really?

Can the government do anything inexpensively?

The government is only good at making things worse, and the irony is that it sets a heavy price tag for its "services."

You want to improve health care? Get the government out of it where it already is entrenched. Don't open the flood gates to regulation and bureaucracy.