Liberalism, Responsibility and The Consequences...

Reading this reminded me of the real problems that health care reform completely and totally ignores. To quote:

At last, the U.S. has come around to universal coverage. Obamacare fixes the terrible injustice of people who can't get health insurance because they're already sick, and people who lose their coverage when they lose their jobs

The "terrible injustice" here isn't that people can't get insurance because they're already sick, or that people lose their coverage when they lose their jobs: the terrible injustice is that people have to bear the consequences of their own decisions, and when they make bad decisions, it's terrible. People who don't get insurance when they are healthy are gambling that they won't; people who have no savings and cannot afford private health insurance during times between jobs are living beyond their means: in either case, they have made a deliberate decision not to take insurance. When they lose their bet, it's a terrible tragedy.

But it has nothing to do with health insurance: they probably don't have life insurance, either. Terrible things happen to people who do not plan for them happening: insuring yourself costs money that they prefer to spend on other things, and is, fundamentally, no different than taking a weekly paycheck and gambling with it to see if you can meet the mortgage this month: if you lose it, then you will barely have enough to pay the bills and make that mortgage payment as well, but if it works, you've got plenty to consume with. While you can choose to live life this way - it's a free country for the time being - it's inherently risky and just plain foolish, since the likelihood that you will be living on a shoe string is so great that it makes no sense to behave this way.


What ObamaCare really means is that personal responsibility for insuring yourself against risks is gone: it has been replaced by the Government deciding what is good for you and what is not good for you. Hence opulent health care insurance for those who prefer such plans will be taxed - at the core, it's a sin tax - and the real problems are not addressed at all:

What you can bet on is that Obamacare will fail miserably at containing costs. Americans already spend 60 per cent more money on health care per capita than we do. Yet, this legislation will do nothing to check the power of trial lawyers, unions, Big Pharma or doctors. It does nothing to check consumer demand for more and better treatments. (And if it did, Americans really would revolt.) Instead of containing costs, the legislation adds even more open-ended entitlement programs.

The official estimate says Obamacare will cost $1-trillion over the next 10 years but will actually lower federal deficits. Don't believe it. A more likely result, reckons Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, is that it will add at least another $562-billion to the deficit, which is already projected to reach an impressive $1.2-trillion by 2020.

I'll repeat what I've said more than once: any health care reform that does not include tort reform to reduce the power of trial lawyers is doomed from the start. For the tort lawyers, ObamaCare is manna from heaven: instead of the deep pockets of the insurance industry (and ultimately their customers) to dig in, the risks are transferred to the US taxpayers, who will bear the costs (since the US government will, after the slow destruction of the insurance industry through this "reform", perforce be the one providing insurance via government-owned industries) at the end of the day.

Liberalism, in removing personal responsibility for any human action, will destroy the economy and government finances in the chimerical pursuit of fighting injustice.

Newsflash for liberals: the universe doesn't give a flying shit about justice. This is much, much worse than the English King ordering the tide to not flow in: this is the enthronement of irresponsibility as the highest good.

Which creates the greatest injustice of it all: you will be punished for obeying the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

That way lies madness. But madness, as we are increasingly seeing, is a function of willful ignorance that you cannot change the laws of economics to suit your own goals, just as you cannot change the laws of physics because they are inconvenient.



I'll repeat this: I know I sound like a broken record, but we simply need to demand a higher quality of work from our government.

We know we're not getting it now.


The Democrats are now officially The Party Not To Be Trusted With Sharp Objects. They cannot be trusted with anything that involves them counting beyond their appendages. They cannot be trusted with national security, they cannot be trusted to do anything but be such caring empaths.

Ye Gods of the Copybook Headings...