Government "Incentives" in Healthcare

The following article by David I Knowlton, a former deputy commissioner of health in New Jersey and current president and CEO of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, has been published in the June 24, 2009 Star-Ledger of NJ. This is just another man with another statist plan.

Health reform isn't brain surgery

My Commentary:

Posted by Zemack on 06/24/09 at 8:39PM
The purveyors of government control of medicine, euphemistically called "national health care reform", offer all kinds of angles to plug their wares. In all cases, they start by citing the current problems in American healthcare, and propose some government-imposed solution.

What they never acknowledge is the fact that our current system is a creation of government. Yet they hold the government up to be champions of their own victims.

The premise that "we are all our brothers' keepers" is the governing principle, and is the first major problem. America currently spends some $7500 per capita per year ($30,000 per family of four and rising) on healthcare. Almost 90% of that amount represents people spending other people's money. There are the government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP. There is the tax distortion-created third-party-payer system. There are the thousands of state and federal dictates imposed on the insurance industry such as community ratings, guaranteed issue, and benefits mandates which are nothing more than wealth redistribution masquerading as insurance. Today's private insurance industry is actually a quasi-private, government created and protected cartel, and is not indicative of a free market. It is a conduit for government edicts, not a dynamic, competitive, entrepreneurial industry free to tailor policy choices to market realities.

Our system is a combination of communism for seniors, the poor, and some peoples' children...and fascism for the rest of us.

Ours is a system in which everyone is forced to pay for everyone else's healthcare, but is not responsible for his own (except for small co-pays and deductibles). What kind of incentives does anyone think that will create? Yet Mr. Knowlton prattles about "urging our leaders to realign incentives in the health care system", and "plenty of models we can look to for guidance". There sure is a model to look toward - a free market, the system based upon the recognition of individual rights. Instead of forcing us to take care of everyone else, while at the same time demanding that everyone else...i.e., the government...take care of us, how about getting government out of healthcare and health insurance and leave us free to make our own decisions and take personal responsibility for our own health? You'd be surprised what kinds of incentives are evident when you reap the rewards of good habits and pay the price for the bad, while having our unalienable rights guaranteed.

But it is not solutions that are the goal. It is power...the power of control by bureaucratic and political elites. The artificial "incentives" and tax-funded "investments" are code words for the coming tyranny.

It gets tiresome to hear the David Knowltons of the world keep promoting government solutions to the problems created by government. Our money is not "there for the taking" by any man with another plan. Our money and property are not his, nor the government's, nor anyone's to dispose of...except those who earned it.

The current "debate" on "reform" is an intellectual and philosophical fraud, leaving Americans with the false perception that our choice is either the status quo or submission to state-run medicine. There is no political sponsorship for the authentic alternative.

Any honest and objective healthcare reform debate must begin with an examination of how we got to this point to begin with. The problems in American healthcare have grown in lock step with the growth of government intervention over the past 75 years. The solution is to discover capitalism. The only just and moral course to take on healthcare reform is to rid healthcare of government interference. End all government insurance mandates, barriers to inter-state competition, 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, as is their unalienable right under American principles. Leave healthcare dollars in the hands of the people that earned it through some vehicle like HSAs, leave providers and insurers free to compete directly for those consumer dollars, and restrict the government to its proper role of protector of the individual rights of all (which includes anti-fraud laws and enforcement of contracts). The natural incentives inherent in a free market provide the proper, moral dynamics for affordable, widely available quality healthcare.