Dan

Calabrese

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July 9, 2009

Dependence Upon Dependence: Democrats ‘Fix’ Health Care Yet Again

Health care needs reform, all right, but not the kind President Obama says it needs. Try this:

Get a new window for your house, pay the installer, then submit the bill to the company that holds your home insurance policy for reimbursement.

Ridiculous? Of course. The purpose of home insurance is to pay for an accident or unforeseen calamity that no one could predict, no one would choose and for which no one would or could budget. Your house burns down. Your carpet gets destroyed by a flood. This is why you have home insurance.

If you want new windows, as the man in Lou’s Café would say to Marty McFly, you’re gonna pay for it, pal!

But I’ve got one that’s even more ridiculous for you:

Go to your doctor for any problem. It doesn’t matter what. Learn from the woman at the front desk that the charge for the visit is $75. Reach into your pocket, pull out $75, and try to give it to her.

Meltdown!

The woman at the front desk, because of the culture in which she has become deeply steeped, only understands the language of insurance forms, reimbursements, coverage denials and so on. Accepting a $75 payment for a $75 service is as foreign to her as snowstorms to a native Hawaiian.

Even though she is perfectly capable of initiating a simple financial transaction to pay for her groceries, this complicated mumbo-jumbo seems quite normal to her in the health care arena. And it might seem normal to you, as well, since this is what you’re used to when you go to the doctor.

Democrats created this problem (to be fair, two generations ago), and every time they try to “reform” it, they make it worse. Before World War II, not many people had health insurance. People went to the doctor and paid for the service. How could they afford that? Well, without a huge insurance bureaucracy to support, and without the perverse economic incentives that occur when you make something seem free, it wasn’t all that expensive in those days.

When the federal government froze wages during the war, it allowed employers to offer company-paid health insurance as a fringe benefit – and made such benefits tax-deductible – so companies could do something to add to the value they offered their people without violating the law.

Employer-paid health insurance was never anyone’s idea of a brilliant innovation. But as employees got used to the idea of health insurance as a fringe benefit, it became increasingly expected that good employers would buy you insurance to cover your doctors’ office visits and other medical needs.

Americans developed a mindset that health care was a special need for which they should not be expected to pay out of their own pockets. And when we started to hear about 40-some-odd million Americans lacking health insurance (even though the vast majority of those lack it only for very short periods of time), we were willing to believe this was a crisis.

President Obama’s plan to spend $1 trillion to “reform” this system will, if enacted, do exactly the opposite. By creating a “public option” to compete with private insurance, he will not only reinforce the notion that people must depend on a benevolent third party to pay for their health care, he will also establish a new standard that says only government can really perform this function in a satisfactory manner.

During the presidential campaign, John McCain proposed switching tax deductions upside down so the feds would permit deductions for individual health care purchases, rather than for employer-paid insurance. Obama jumped all over McCain for one half of that – the part about removing the deduction for employer-paid insurance – without being honest and dealing with the other side of the equation.

Now, Obama is looking to tax employer-paid health insurance – the very thing for which he ripped McCain – without offering a commensurate deduction for health care purchased by individuals. So, those of you whose decision to vote for Obama was based at least in part on this issue, you got hosed. Along with all the rest of us.

During his first term, George W. Bush got Congress to approve the expansion of Health Savings Accounts, by which you save money tax-free to purchase your own health care, and buy a far less costly insurance policy to protect you against catastrophic costs, but not routine health care purchases. You keep the money you don’t spend, and it’s yours even if you lose your job or change jobs.

If everyone in America had a Health Savings Account, individuals would be empowered and other problems inherent in the system would be very easily managed. The mindset of Americans that they can’t pay for their own health care would be blessedly blown to pieces. Instead, Democrats are looking to “reform” the dependence problem they created by making us even more dependent on more bureaucracies to take control of what we could and should do for ourselves.

Just wait until another generation goes by, and they try to “fix” this too.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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