In the past five months, President Obama and the Democrats have moved with startling speed and expanded the power of an already out-of-control federal government to heights only dreamed of by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt. Now they are coming after the Holy Grail for socialists – your healthcare. With this power, they will not only secure their absolute control over a massive sector of the economy, but will literally have the power of life and death over millions of Americans.
In order to convince Americans to surrender their liberty on such a massive scale, the collectivists are using the same tactics they have for decades. The method is to create or exploit a “crisis”, which will in turn justify the suspension of constitutional limitations on government. Since last fall, they have used an economic recession – an event which has occurred on average every 5- 1/2 years since 1945 - to manufacture a horrifying crisis requiring the unconstitutional nationalization of banks and automobile manufacturing companies, and an unprecedented increase in government spending.
Now they will stoke the fires of the bogus “healthcare crisis” to justify nationalizing the industry and take away your right to privately contract for your own health care needs. The issue of the high cost of health care has been referred to by socialists as a crisis since the Clinton administration tried to implement socialized medicine under the Hillary Care plan in 1993. What kind of “crisis” lasts for sixteen years?
The collectivists and world-savers told us during the election that there are 45 million Americans without health insurance, although that number seems to have jumped to more than 50 million now that the push is on for a government takeover. What they won’t tell you is that 43% of these uninsured “Americans” are not Americans at all – they are aliens of both legal and illegal status. People who simply do not work make up 26%, and people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, who generally do not see the need to pay for health insurance, constitute 29%. Nearly 8% are people in higher income ranges, many of whom may simply choose to pay out of pocket for their medical needs. While some of these groups overlap, it is clear that the actual number of uninsured Americans is less than half what we are told by our rulers in Washington.
They also won’t tell you that government is the reason healthcare costs so much. The government already lays out more than half of all the health care dollars spent in the United States. This money is doled out by an army of bureaucrats who have no incentive to identify fraud and who also have to be paid salaries and benefits at taxpayer expense. This government control of half the health care market results in a gross distortion of the marketplace and causes prices to rise.
Health insurance, on the other hand is not insurance in the traditional sense at all. “Insurance” traditionally means paying a relatively small amount of money to someone, who in turn promises to pay you a very large sum of money if an unlikely event were to happen. For example, you pay an insurer $500 a year for homeowner’s insurance, but in the unlikely event that your house burns down, he will pay you $250,000 to replace it. Traditional health insurance would work the same way, paying relatively small premiums to pay for an unlikely catastrophic illness. Instead we have developed, as a result of government meddling, a system of paying large premiums to an insurer who in turn pays for nearly all of our healthcare costs. Each of these payments has to wind their way through either a private bureaucracy or an incompetent government agency, greatly adding to the cost. Doctors who accept insurance have to hire a staff just to deal with the paperwork – so you have to pay him and his employees.
