Insuring Insecurity
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Hysteria can be very entertaining.
Take the current and rancorous debate concerning health care insurance (do note that proposals polluting Congress have noting to do with health care but everything to do with economics). We have in recent days seen episodes of fear induced hysteria that turned alleged adults into mindless, defensive, stuttering buffoons, barely able to articulate their dread much less anything resembling coherent policy opinion.
I am, of course, referring to the Obama administration.
(An aside, applying the word hysteria to the current and temporary administration seems appropriate. The word devolves from the Greek, hysterikós, which means “suffering in the womb.” The ancient Greeks believed that hysteria was peculiar to women and caused by disturbances in the uterus. Then again old Greeks had a lot of odd notions about women, deities and sex with young boys, so we can only accept their literary input. Since Obamacare appears to be stillborn, the visual of Barack’s legislation “suffering in the womb” seems amusingly apropos).
Within one House and four Senate bills, we see that health care is not the issue. Health care is provided by doctors, nurses and hospitals, supplied with gear and goo invented, manufactured and sold by industry. Government can not provide health care.
But they can screw up its availability as they have done many times.
Insurance is a legislatively rigged game. There has not been an open market for health insurance in my life time and even a few years before I was seeded. Every legislative intervention the government made in insurance markets raised premiums. Now Obama’s cabal proposes intervening again, and every line of every bill seems designed to make private health insurance even more costly.
This is why the large insurance companies back Barack’s plans as they did previous plots. Why work to make money when purchased politicians can craft laws that boost income while crippling your competitors. Two past legislative transgressions are good examples of how government is looking out for someone other than you.
Federal law prevents companies not located in your state from selling you insurance. Stated differently, you – an allegedly free American – are prohibited from buying insurance from who you want. Californians should have the ability to buy coverage from Alaska, or Alabama, or Azerbaijan if it so suits them. Preventing such free trade benefits large insurance companies that can afford establishing offices in every state while blocking smaller competitors. In the Internet age, software savvy insurers surely exist who could bring health insurance costs low through technology (yield maximization modeling software, consumer self-service, etc.) providing they were free to do so. With less competition, major insurance companies can keep rates high and raise them in lock-step. This particularly putrid enactment serves customers quite well … the customers being large insurance company lobbyist and the product being Congress.
Barack doesn’t want you to be free, to buy insurance from wherever you please. He said so in the presidential debate when McCain offered legislation to reverse this disruption in the market. Of course Obama is also on record – many times – stating he prefers a “single payer” (i.e., monopoly) insurance agency, namely Uncle Sugar Insurance, Inc.
State governments, being equally psychotic as the Federal variety, have their own means for reducing insurance company competition and raising your rates. The gimmicks are called “mandates.” As the name reveals, these are decrees from politicians who see themselves as elected monarchs (interesting: ‘monopoly’, ‘monarchs’. I sense a theme among the soon to cede ruling class).
Mandates force insurance companies to provide you with certain services, even those you do not use. Mandates are manic. Situations arise that would be outrageous if they were not so comical. Take my buddy Dave, who claims to be the gayest man in San Francisco (watching him work a bar one night, I fear he might be right). The State of California (a.k.a. The State of Disaster) requires Dave’s insurance company to provide him with contraceptives and in vitro fertilization services.
Needless to say, gay Dave doesn’t need either.
But Dave has to pay for them. His insurance company lacks legal options for not providing those services. Frankly, his insurance company doesn’t want Dave to opt out. Having Dave pay for services he will never use is free money for the insurer, which explains why insurance company lobbyists stuffed legislator pockets to pass mandates, and to grow the list of required coverage over time.
None of this has been lost on the public. One reason for Obama’s rapidly growing hysteria is that the hoi polloi understand the abuses they already suffer under our government-rigged insurance system, but they have also studied newly proposed legislation. When Obama sees housewives walking into town hall meetings with 1,000 pages of legislation under their arm, with select passages highlighted and pages indexed with PostIt stickers, Barack knows that his new health insurance schemes will not receive bums-rush passage as did his massive spending and political payback bill.
Barack Obama resembles Mel Brooks in History of the World. Playing the King of France, Brooks had an aide run to his side and proclaim “Your highness, the peasants are revolting!” to which Obama … err … Brooks replies “You said it. They stink on ice!”
Doctors are familiar with the dictum primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm.” The government has done massive harm to the people in deference to their masters on K Street. Before any new health insurance legislation passes, the harm done must be healed. Health insurance competition must be restored and liberalized. Any real inequities afterwards can then be rationally addressed.
Then again, this is politics and rationality has little to do with it. Just ask our hysterical president.
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