By Daniel
McLaughlin, 6/22/17
I just got notice that
the cost of our health insurance is going up almost fourteen percent for the
year. To give some perspective, if you accept the official figures, the
consumer inflation rate is 1.9%. The increase in premium is more than seven
times the overall rate of consumer price increases. About the same time, I read
that New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, will unilaterally implement measures to
subject New Yorkers to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions even if
Congress repeals and replaces it. He is only one of many who whole-heartedly
embrace the tragedy of Obamacare.
The House of Representatives
with a Republican majority have come up with one version of a replacement,
while the Senate Republicans work on their own. Critics of the measures are
correct in that a Republican bill will not be an adequate replacement, but most
of them get it wrong as to why that is.
The underlying problem
is that the Republicans buy into the same basic fallacy as the Democrats in
designing Obamacare, that government
central planners can correct what they believe are market failures. They
believe that Washington bureaucrats can design one system that works for
hundreds of millions of people spread out over millions of square miles of
wildly dissimilar geography, those in tiny, isolated back-woods mountain
villages as well as residents in mega-metropolitan centers, with different
objectives, priorities, desires, capacities, and resources. It is the same
brazen arrogance of all central planners throughout history.
By accepting the
premises that everyone has a right, not only to health care, but to the cutting
edge best of everything, that government is made of wise administrators who
have only the best interests of people in mind, and that the market is broken
and needs politicians to fix it, they have become active participants in the
Marxist dialectic. Rather than oppose it, they move the window of acceptable
thought closer to socialist ideals.
It is no doubt that many
people have compassionate motives when they promote progressive/socialist
principles. They sound so darned good: from each according to his ability, to
each according to his need. Utopia is so wonderful. Utopia, however, is a
dreamland with no relation to reality. In contrast, market-based societies
succeed in raising the standard of living consistently, simply because they
allow people to work within reality, based on their own needs, goals and
desires. They let people gain by their own efforts, but hold them accountable
for the effects of their decisions. The incentives encourage productivity and
increased individual prosperity.
Life does, however, seem
so unfair. Some people have personal tragedies of various types, others keep
getting knocked down by circumstances, while still others seem to prosper,
having everything go right in spite of what they do. There really is nothing
unfair about it, however, as long as individual rights to life, liberty, and
property are respected. What is actually unfair and counterproductive is
imposing one view of fairness on everyone through political force.
As we are witnessing,
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is doing a miserable job at
protecting citizens and making healthcare affordable. The lamentable truth is
that, though many opposed it based purely on partisan politics, many recognized
that it would fail, even before it was implemented, simply because it is based
on lies, the socialist lies that everyone deserves everything at the expense of
others and that government can fix all problems.
Republicans will have a
hard time in the future if they continue to embrace progressive ideals and refuse
to differentiate themselves from the Democrats. They will inflict the same
failures and even more misery, because effects arise from causes, not from
political fairy dust.
Originally published on Daniel-McLaughlin.com.
http://affluentinvestor.com/2017/06/affordable-care-fairy-dust/
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