Health Care: Things to Consider

Apparently, health care is top of the list of the issues voters seem to care most about this year.

I think I know why: They see it as broken, and want it fixed. Whether they want it fixed like a referee can fix a game, or whether they want it fixed like you want your broken car to get fixed remains to be seen.

Folks, don’t let the democrats distract you on this important issue. What’s at stake here is your liberty. Your economic liberty. Your right to have your health care the way you want it.

Democrats are going to try and shift the debate to health insurance, but health insurance is not health care. What is really at stake are the jobs of millions of health care professionals and the hundreds of millions who pay them their salary. Whether that salary comes direct, as I pay, or that salary comes through insurance redemptions, it is irrelevant. Doctors won’t work for free. They have families to feed. And we won’t get new doctors with the same level of training unless there is an economic incentive to write off 10 years of your life in school and training.

I believe that the reason health care is as messed up is because of the government getting involved where it never should be. See, the reason you expect health care to come with your job is because, back in World War II, your salaries were fixed by the government. (This is the bad kind of fixing. See, at the time, salaries were shooting up because there was a severe labor shortage.) Since companies couldn’t compensate their workers with cold, hard cash (thanks to government), they had to find other ways of compensating them. Health insurance was one of the few ways that they could pay  their employees more without paying them more money.

Well, fast forward fifty years, and now we expect companies to pay part of our salary with health insurance. This is a drag on those people that either don’t have jobs or don’t have large enough companies to buy health insurance at a reasonable rate. But as we see, the health insurance industry is willing to innovate, and there are solutions coming out.

But over the years, government has made so many rules and regulations and judgments about how health insurance works, that it has lost a lot of its free market mobility. Add to the equation that the government is competing with the health insurance industry by providing Medicare and Medicaid, and states providing whatever they provide, and you can see why everything is so strange.

I believe that if you got rid of Medicare and Medicaid, got rid of all the rules and regulations, you would have a health insurance industry that could provide the same level of coverage for far cheaper—perhaps even half the price or more.