Ken Gordon on "The Public Option"

The gross dishonesty and/or ignorance about the causes of the current healthcare/health insurance "crisis" is evident in this piece.

Nothing Good Just Happens

The author, Ken Gordon, is the former Majority Leader of the Colorado State Senate.

My Commentary:

Mike Zemack said...

What Mr. Gordon doesn’t say is that our system of health insurance is a creation of the government. The third-party-payer system was imposed by government via tax-code distortions. Perversely, the insurance company works not for the consumer but for the employer, union, or other third party that purchases the policy, even though the consumer’s own earnings pay for it. The thousands of state and federal mandates imposed on the insurers dictate the content of the policies, force consumers to pay for coverages that they may not want, sharply drives up the cost of the policies, and actually creates a system of pre-paid healthcare…not insurance. State restraint-of-trade practices prevent a competitive national insurance market from developing, also driving prices up and choices down.

Our system of health insurance is an absurd, government-created Rube Goldberg concoction, administered by quasi-private companies forbidden to tailor policies to market demand; i.e., the choices and budgets of the actual, individual consumers of healthcare. It has created huge unnecessary administrative costs throughout the system, undermined the doctor-patient relationship, placed undue power in the hands of government and insurance company bureaucrats, inverted the normal market incentives that lead to higher quality, lower prices, and wide availability, and tied people to their jobs.

Now Mr. Gordon and his ilk propose to “solve” the problems they themselves caused by creation of the fraud called a “public option”. This is nothing more than a back-door attempt at something Americans have never wanted…totalitarian government control of healthcare. The government holds a legal monopoly on physical force. The “option” is backed by this power of the gun. The politicians can and will do whatever it takes to support their “public option”. It will use tax subsidies to keep premiums “affordable”; arbitrary regulatory powers to hamper its private “competitors”, etc. The government will act as any organized crime syndicate does…use its unique power of physical compulsion to drive private citizens out of business. To say that there can be competition between a government-owned entity and private companies is to see no difference between an armed thug and his victims.

The obvious and only moral solution to the problems in health insurance cited by Mr. Gordon is to liberate the insurance market of all of this government interference, leaving individuals and insurers free to contract directly with each other to mutual advantage…a freedom that is theirs by unalienable right. But solutions are not the goal; power is. Having crippled the industry, making it unable to function, it is now cast as the villain. Every advancing dictatorship needs scapegoats.

The real liars here are the “public option” advocates. The problems in American healthcare have grown in lock step with the growth of government intervention. Any honest and objective healthcare reform debate must begin with an examination of how we got to this point to begin with. Instead, they are now declaring that freedom has failed, consumers are too stupid to understand health insurance, and that dictatorship is the answer.

But today’s problems in medicine represent a failure, not of freedom, but of statist government intervention. The choice we face…for ordinary Americans and providers alike…is between being held in a stranglehold by government central planners, or taking control of our own healthcare in a truly free market.