The "Public Health Insurance" Option

From the Reader Forum of the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

Oppose insurance lobbyists

During the election, President Obama promised to give everyone the choice of private insurance or a public health insurance plan like Medicare with lower premiums and better benefits.

Obama's public health insurance option could save us up to 30 percent on our insurance premiums by being more efficient and driving down prices across the board, according to the Commonwealth Fund report.

The insurance lobbyists are fighting Obama's public health insurance option. They're fighting against us -- you and me. Insurance companies know that lower costs for us mean lower profits for them.

Resist and overcome the lobbyists. Tell your representative and senators.

-- Millicent Sims, Montclair

My Commentary:

Posted by Zemack on 04/28/09 at 7:26PM

It's a sad, shameful spectacle to witness how eagerly and flippantly so many Americans are willing to give up their freedom.

The "public health insurance plan" advocated by Millicent Sims is just another name for socialized medicine, and denying that is dishonest and evasive. Its sole intention is merely a slow-motion path to totalitarian government control of medicine.

A "public" company (or GSE--government-sponsored enterprise) is backed by the legal force of government, which can subsidize it through taxes, while setting legal restrictions on its private "competitors" through its tax and regulatory authority...etc. A private company has no coercive power, and must rely upon the voluntary private market. To pretend that there can exist "competition" between a government-run "insurer" and a private one is to say there is no difference between an armed mugger and his victims.

Ms. Sims writes:

Obama's public health insurance option could save us up to 30 percent on our insurance premiums by being more efficient and driving down prices across the board...

This is a case of the mugger posing as his victim's savior. Medical costs are exploding because of decades of growing government interference into the healthcare industry, dating back to the 1930s. The natural incentives inherent in a free market...where healthcare providers and insurers compete directly for consumers' business based upon the rights of consumers, providers, patients, and insurers to contract freely and voluntarily with each other to mutual advantage...is what leads to widely available, affordable healthcare. But those incentives are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the Obama plan takes the immoral route.

It is insane to punish the very people you depend upon for your healthcare by empowering bureaucratic government dictators to "drive [i.e., force] down prices". Doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical makers and other producers of healthcare products and services are not slaves but free individuals who have a right to act upon their own judgement on setting prices for there work. The rest of us are likewise free to pay for those services or not, based upon our own judgement. This is called justice. There is no inherent right to healthcare provided by others at any particular price. There is only the right to trade our earnings for those services, based upon voluntary, mutual contractual agreement. Those who believe government should use force against providers in the name of lower costs are advocating theft and slavery.

The solution is to discover capitalism. The only just and moral course to take on healthcare reform is to rid healthcare of government interference. America currently spends some $7500 per capita per year ($30,000 per family of four and rising) on healthcare. Almost that entire amount represents third parties spending other people's money. This is a fundamental part of the problem. That money comes from all of us in a myriad of ways, yet leaves us with little control over how it is spent. Leave that money in the hands of the people that earned it through some vehicle like HSAs, end government insurance mandates and the third-party-payer system, phase out existing "public" plans like Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP, and let people take personal responsibility for their own healthcare.

Today's problems in medicine represent a failure, not of freedom, but of statist government intervention. The choice we face is not between a government-run healthcare dictatorship and the status quo. The choice we face is between being held hostage to government central planners, or taking control of our own healthcare in a truly free market.