Saturday, September 12, 2009

Fiscal Conservative Challenges Obama to a “Big Government” Bet


As an Unwavering Fiscal Conservative, I want America’s fiscal house put back in order. The question seems to be how we do it. For some good reasons, free-market competition in the health-insurance industry actually interferes with competition in the medical field. Our access to medical treatment continues to get worse, as the price continues to skyrocket, and our private insurance companies, despite their best efforts to squeeze down the cost of our dollars going to doctors and hospitals, instead just get in the middle and keep the profits for themselves.

The "Bet" in the Old Life Insurance Joke goes something like this:
Life insurance is where the insurance company bets you that you’ll live forever.
You bet them that you’ll die first.
You put up the money in advance.
Somebody else collects when you die.
Either way—you lose!

Competition Makes Our Free-Market System Work. But for too long in the world of catastrophic-health insurance, competition has gone missing. Texas, where I live, has a population of about 24-million swaggering cowboys and cowgirls, but that's clearly not a big-enough market for insurance competition to flourish. And tort reform—which was passed here quite a few years ago—hasn't done the trick of stopping unnecessary tests or high medical costs.

Insurance Companies Earn the Profits that they need to stay in business, while everyday Americans suffer from exorbitant premiums that keep salaries low, from policies that are withdrawn or used up just when they are needed most, and from policies that ration the care that the medical profession delivers—by demanding too little care in many cases, and encouraging too much waste in others. The medical profession gets shorted, the American people get shorted, and the insurance companies manage to eke out an immodest, but necessary profit.

Since Competition Is What We Want, let’s put health-care insurance to the free-market test of capitalism. President Barack Obama has proposed a tiny bubble of an insurance product, expected to cover less than 5% of the population. This “public option” will receive no tax dollars and will add not a dime to the national budget, but give those Americans who believe that government does some things best a chance to have their ideology tested.

Can Government Deliver Healthcare? Affordable healthcare? Without going broke? Or is this another foolish Liberal fantasy? 

Let’s Let the Free Markets Decide:

President Obama, America Issues You a Challenge. Either your “public option” can do the job of insuring Americans directly or of stimulating better competition throughout the country, or else you shut it down.

America Can Give You Five Years. We can afford this test, when the lives of so many Americans are at stake, but we can only afford so much. Whether the question is an ideology of entitlement or an ideology of greed, you’ve got five years from Day One of the passage of the healthcare reform bill.

But Then When This “Public Option” Fails, or blows through its budget, you owe it to the American people to shut it down.

The Clock on the “Public Option” Starts Ticking Soon.

You Have Five Years.....

Regards,
(($;-)}
Gozo!

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