Hillary Care will become Bureau-care
By Randy Samuelson
As most have heard, Hillary Clinton has a new policy initiative for her goal of socialized medicine. Her newest initiative is to mandate that all individuals have health insurance and require all businesses to provide health care to their employees. If a business cannot provide the health insurance, the government will subsidize the insurance. Her goal seems so noble, but shouldn’t the goal be to reduce the cost of health care for all and focus on preventative check ups and not for the federal government to subsidize insurance companies? What would the Democrat trial lawyers say when they found out that Hillary desires to subsidize their courtroom opponents? To put this in simple terms, the actual implementation of this program will become a bureaucratic monstrosity and will work to drive the price of health care up.
There is a government agency called the Government Service Administration (GSA). Their job is to provide office supplies and equipment to federal bureaucracies. One of the things they provide to federal bureaucracies is vehicles. When GSA provides a vehicle, the maintenance schedule for the vehicle is dictated by GSA, not the individual driver that the vehicle is assigned to in a remote office. Preventative maintenance of these vehicles is seldom performed because it is based on the government’s timeline, not the vehicle’s timeline. If there is an emergency, such as a damaged water pump, the primary driver cannot take the vehicle to just any shop. First, they have to ask for GSA’s permission to replace the water pump and, if the GSA bureaucrat agrees to the repair, you will be given a mechanic who operates under an existing GSA contract. This mechanic can sometimes be two or three counties away and the vehicle may not be operational for that long. Do you see the dilemma? This is a common occurrence for government vehicles.
Now, think of the sentence above in terms of mandated health care or subsidized insurance. Who will dictate the schedule of maintenance? It will be a bureaucrat either in Washington or in the insurance company, not the individual seeking the care. If there is an emergency, just like in an HMO, you will be given a doctor that you will use if the emergency is deemed important enough.
And now, think about the increased cost of insurance premiums for all Americans because the government is subsidizing the cost of insurance for those whom the insurance companies deem should not be covered because of the risk factors? Not everybody has insurance because there are risks involved in selling a person insurance. If the person is at high risk, the price of their insurance will naturally be higher or the person may not be sold insurance at all. By using government subsidies to mandate health insurance for all, the cost of insurance increases for everybody as many of the new individuals will cost the insurance company a lot of money to provide health care for.
If liberals truly want to provide better health care for everybody, the policies should be defined in terms to reduce the cost and government red tape. Reducing the cost of an item will ensure that more people have the ability to purchase it and will ensure that there is more competition for that particular item. Hillary Care, and to some extent the current health care system, creates a system in which the insurance company, the government, and the doctor is the consumer (of limited revenue) instead of the provider of a service. By enacting policies that drive down the price of health care and allow for free market competition, the individual becomes the consumer, choosing which doctor to use based on cost and quality and comfort of service provided. Allowing individuals to purchase Health Savings Accounts and removing government the bureaucratic regulatory power of the Federal Drug Administration (whose goal is to protect American pharmaceutical companies, not to ensure quality drugs) are just two such examples of policies that can be implemented to drive down the cost of health care.
What this country needs now is quality health care at a reduced cost with more options to the consumer, not more liberal rhetoric. There is a trade-off cost to subsidizing health care for everybody and most Americans will not be satisfied with those trade-offs. Socialized medicine only helps those socialists who will be creating the plans and a few select insurance companies who will get rich off of those policies. Do not be suckered in by Hillary’s rhetoric and her feigned care for the poor. She is only using the poor to get herself elected.
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