Free enterprise the answer to health care uninsured
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
In July of 2008, we urged attention to Paul Johnson’s classic work “Intellectuals” as a guide to the perils of handing presidential power to the untested, increasingly demagogic Barack Obama.
Johnson, the British economist and historian, made a central point in his book to warn of the multiple horrors inflicted on the world when highly educated but impractical, arrogant, charismatic intellectuals achieve political power.
One point was that such rulers come prepackaged with messianic “rule or ruin” mentalities, accompanied by grand schemes for human improvement.
V. I. Lenin, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are the best-known examples. They shared the trait of requiring that all ground be leveled to build whatever base was needed to enact their fantasies.
Today in America we have a health care system that is the envy of the world. Eighty percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. People come here from around the world for medical diagnosis and procedures. We do not go elsewhere.
The pivot point of discontent centers on the relatively small percentages of Americans not covered by health insurance.
A large percentage of this group is actually eligible under existing government plans, either as seniors, other adults or children. They need only to get enrolled. Another sizeable group is younger, self-sufficient Americans who apparently feel no need to prepare against serious injury or ill health.
Still others are temporarily between jobs, but can’t carry their insurance from old employer to new. That group makes a good case and the problem needs addressing.
Others have a problem of not getting insurance because of pre-existing conditions.
Of an estimated 22-45 million people not covered by insurance, as many as 12 million are not citizens at all and are in the United States illegally. It’s an open question whether the average American wants our working system, even with some flaws mentioned above, junked to accommodate people here illegally.
One simple truth is that very few sick or injured people are turned away from health care, whether they show up unannounced at clinics or in hospital emergency rooms. Under law, hospitals must treat them — citizens or illegal aliens.
A really good option, never mentioned in Obama circles, would have us find a way to solve the problem of the legitimately uninsured through free enterprise private plans without resorting to the utopian foray into socialism.
Britain, Canada and France offer excellent models to avoid. The three are adrift in problems of budget meltdown, quality control and delays, even until death, to sustain the unsustainable. Ironically, those nations are said to be flirting with private health systems.
Attempting to follow health care legislation has this writer wondering, as did the late, great baseball manager Casey Stengel, on another topic, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
It would help if Congress were to read the bills they enact into the laws of the land.
It would help further if Congress or Obama could decide on something definite — up to and including getting the specifics of a health care bill in place.
Will Obamacare cost $1 trillion, as first claimed, or will a better guess be $1.5 trillion or more over 10 years?
What about the elderly? Will the bill create a new class of the “disadvantaged” — that is, the age-disadvantaged, whose health and even whose lives are to be dangled before actuaries, civil servants and medical boards appointed by Obama?
Will the privileged retinue of members of Congress, past and present, the federal bureaucracy, and selected labor unions continue to have gold-plated private plans while average people tough it out with public plans and/or rationing?
Conservatives insist that budget realities in the wake of Obamacare will force rationing of health services.
Obama, in his ignorance, may have pointed the way in the case of a woman whose mother survived a heart operation at an advanced age and who sought a pacemaker.
As reported, the president said that people like the patient, because of the age factor, should consider taking pain pills.
It took our fellow columnist, Charles Krauthammer, a former medical practitioner, to point out on Fox News Channel that pain pills are hardly an answer to a heart arrhythmia.
July 2009
