Once again, it’s been a while since I posted, and yes, I have been busy with life. However, with the firehose of stupidity coming out of Washington lately, it’s hard to have time to compose my thoughts about one outrage before there is yet another roaring down the pike at us.

I am physically nauseated every day watching the new national socialists (a.k.a., "progressives" or "Democrats" or "Republicans") move us ever closer to state corporatism. Forget Nancy “Liar, Liar Pants on Fire” Pelosi’s outrageous behavior, the President’s illegal firing of an inspector general to protect his cronies, the bed-wettingly frightening prospect of letting ACORN and Rahm Emanuel control the census, the biggest national deficit in our entire history, not as a country but as a species, the political deal to trade the safety of our troops for a hundred billion dollars we don’t have for the IMF and the media’s absolute complicity in all of it.

I want to talk about health care tonight.  Walk with me, won’t you, down the Primrose Path to our state-corporatist-socialist future.

Is or is it not true that health insurance is basically a bet with distributed risk? The insurance company (the house) collects your premium (stake), betting that you will not need a payout. Your bet is that you will. The insurance company collects the premiums of its entire client base and pays out of that pool, and takes some of the money to cover costs and to make a profit. The company also sets some rules to minimize its risk: no preexisting conditions, or higher premiums for clients with higher risks, etc.   The broad pool of clients makes for a large pool of money, facilitating the ability to cover costly procedures for what the company hopes will always be a small minority of its clients.

What the company doesn’t do very well, however, is negotiate prices for services rendered. Medical care providers, following the profit motive, will ask the highest price they think they can get. Since there is no real limit to how much can be paid, the very existence of the insurance companies inflate the price for medical care – the balance of supply and demand has shifted in favor of supply in this case.

Enter government. Against all common sense, but with the best of intentions, government decrees that health care providers must provide services to patients regardless of their ability to pay. Since the health care providers can’t bill people with no ability to pay, they recoup their costs by inflating their prices yet again so that the people who do pay through their insurance companies get stuck for a portion of the cost of caring for patients who can’t pay. It is an unofficial tax to support a social program that is levied and collected by the healthcare providers simply so they can remain in business.   Health care costs soar, premiums soar and now it is nearly impossible for anyone with a moderate income to afford health care and/or insurance.

Then government strikes again, this time with government-sponsored health (and now drug coverage) insurance like Medicare, Medicaid and TRICare. Because it’s the government and can’t be sued, the government simply says to the health care provider, “Okay, here’s what we’re willing to pay, take it or leave it.” Usually it’s only a small percentage of the actual bill, so the government stiffs the provider who has to either (1) raise their rates on everyone else to cover it, or (2) refuse to accept Medicare, Medicaid or TRICare. (That’s why so many doctors have stopped taking TRICare, leaving those patients dependent on less skilled, less-qualified or less-experienced doctors. Moreover, because of all this madness, small businesses that once could afford to pay for medical and dental insurance suddenly have to cease paying this benefit because it’s too expensive anymore, thereby adding more uninsured patients, once again increasing costs to everyone.

Now the government wants to create a single payer system. It’s not politically viable for them to say we’re taking over the health care system, so they say the government program won’t be a mandate, just an option available to people so everyone can have health insurance. (But wasn’t the creation of big health insurance programs the start of the problem to begin with? But I digress…) Oh, and by the way, to help pay for it, we’ll start taxing workers’ health care benefits. (Another Obama campaign lie). So now no small business can afford to pay the cost of insurance and the additional taxes, so the government program grows. Health insurance companies can’t compete with the efficiencies of scale that government has, so they quietly go bankrupt and out of business. 

Now we’re stuck with a huge government program and what will amount to the defense contractors of health care who will bid for government contracts. Since the government will determine what it is willing to pay, and because everyone will be on the health care dole by then, every hospital will look like Walter Reed: understaffed, with vast waiting rooms and horrible wait times. Forget nipping out for a couple of hours to see your doctor – you’re there for the day, baby, and that after waiting six months or more just to get an appointment.

Since the government won’t pay as well as they should, the skilled and qualified physicians will probably quit, leaving the field open to lesser doctors, increasing the risks of incompetence and malpractice. Can’t really blame the doctors, though. As Dr. Sanity put it on June 13th:

"I will simply not practice medicine anymore. I will take my psychiatry books and my years of experience and do something else. I used to wait tables when I was in college. It's an honest living and Obama isn't interested for the time being in nationalizing restaurants--yet.

"Let me be clear. I don't believe that people have a "right" to health care; because, what advocating such a "right" basically means is that you believe you have a "right" to my mind; you have a "right" to my professional competence; i.e., you have a "right" to enslave me."

In fact once you declare that health care is a “right,” you have declared it to be a “public good” like national defense. In that case, the only model that makes sense is to create a National Healthcare Service Corps, probably under the Department of Health, that is run the same way that the military services are and with the same corporate infrastructure to back it up – pharmaceutical and medical equipment labs vs. weapons labs. Now in addition to the military-industrial complex, you’ll be able to add a medical-industrial complex that’s just as inefficient and just as dependent upon and wasteful of trillions of taxpayer dollars as the lefties always want to accuse the DoD of being.

Personally I say screw ‘em. Lets do away with government health care programs and massive health insurance companies that do nothing except create a feeding frenzy for the corporate healthcare industry that inflates costs beyond all reason. ($12 for a couple of Tylenol? $350,000 or more for a month in hospital?) Let’s see what happens when we re-introduce actual market forces. Maybe, just maybe we’d get more healthcare professionals and more and better care rather than the rationing that will surely accompany a single-payer government-run system.

(Hat Tip to Michelle Malkin for the picture.)