You Might Be a Liberal Page 9
If you have ever been picked up by a bus to go vote on election day…
If you hate special interest groups but applaud giving General Motors and Chrysler to their unions…
If your voting record is consistent with the local cemetery precinct voting records…
...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)
“We must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you... ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”
—Jeremiah Wright, Mentor to Barack Obama
“If your mere existence creates debt for me – that you’re entitled to health care simply because you exist, then that means if you’re hungry I owe you food. If you’re thirsty, I owe you water. And if you need shelter, I owe you a home because you exist. And what’s the thanks I get? Give me more! I’m entitled! You liberals are philosophically bankrupt!”
—Andrew Wilkow, Host of Wilkow Majority
12: OBAMA CARE VERSUS AUTO INSURANCE
If you think keeping your doctor means I can keep paying him so you can start using him…
Liberals love to go around and flaunt their supposedly brilliant “auto insurance” analogy as a way of intellectually supporting Obama Care and the notion that government forcing people to buy insurance is old hat and no big deal. That analogy, like all liberal talking points, crumbles under further review. And by review, I mean applying the tenets of Obama Care to that very analogy.
Consider: It is no more practical to have health insurance to pay for prescription drugs and routine doctor visits than it is to expect your auto insurance to pay for your oil changes and tire rotations. It also makes no more sense to force health insurers to cover pre-existing conditions than it does to force auto insurance companies to start a policy after your car is in the ditch or on fire. And come to think of it, it makes no more sense to tie health insurance to your place of employment than it does to do the same for auto insurance.
But we do. And sadly now, not just the liberals among us expect that. Oh, it was the liberal mindset that started this whole thing, but too many Americans have bought into this unsustainable time bomb for too long as a matter of habit. Perhaps the absurd Obama Super PAC “cancer ad” will shine some light on the subject. The notion that a company health plan should cover a spouse who never worked for that company and who was never on that plan, for six years after the husband was no longer employed at the company, will wake some people up. I’m not even sure how you analogize that to auto insurance. Keeping health insurance tied to employment is unnecessary in the first place, and just another unsustainable part of our culture brought to us by powerful unions. Behind every economic catastrophe you will find a powerful union, if you dig deep enough.
Actually, almost everything about our health care system now is unsustainable, but the Obama Care solution is to throw out what is working and to multiply the major flaws. Comparing auto and health insurance is a good way of pointing this out, and besides, they brought it up.
If a health insurance type system existed for auto insurance, it would certainly result in those quick lube oil changes costing about ninety-five dollars instead of something like thirty-nine. It would require an army of public and private sector bureaucrats to shuffle mounds of paper with hundreds of mouse clicks to make sure you were eligible for your lube job, that you paid your ten dollar “lube co-pay” and that the remaining eighty-five bucks was eventually approved by a Chevy lube specialist underwriter.
Or some such nonsense.
We won’t even mention the fact that your wait in the quick change waiting room would likely resemble the long wait in a doctor’s office, as every other customer transaction would become the paperwork root canal yours is.
(And of course, those who do not have “lube insurance,” or the ninety-five dollars in cash to pay for the lube, will go to the emergency engine shop where they will gum up the works for real emergencies and their lube can be done at no charge to them. This is also known as a different kind of lube job to those of us who pay our own way, who will get hit with a twelve hundred dollar tax tab for their “free” job.)
In the same way, our health care dollars get eaten up by processing claims and indigent care, instead of needed care for those who actually pay for it. And that’s before we force companies to pay for millions of dollars of guaranteed claims related to pre-existing heart conditions or cancers while collecting only hundreds per month in premiums. There is no way that can work, and there are other simpler solutions for the pre-existing condition situation without dragging the entire system down under the guise of fixing that one issue.
Bottom line? The confusion between “health care” and “health insurance” as public policy issues—along with the near universal misunderstanding of what health insurance is (or should be)—is making what should be a rather simple financial planning market solution a national nightmare.
Liberals love this, since all national nightmares tend to require more government bureaucrats to, well, make it even worse under the guise of fixing it.
And all the while, they will be talking out of both sides of their mouth appealing not to intellect, but to emotion and class envy and the desire for quick fixes that seem painless. True to form, the language used has turned the issue much more emotional and much less rational, politically. Liberals say we must reform the system to prevent families from going bankrupt over medical bills, then turn around and debate systems that micro-manage the costs of pills and routine check ups.
Well, which do we really want to do? The issue of keeping families from financial ruin due to catastrophic medical care bills is entirely separate from the daily cost of routine care. The fact that most people have been involved emotionally with the debate over Obama Care for four years and haven’t stopped to process that foundational thought is part of the problem we face. This is why liberals are always gumming up rational debates with emotional pleas and faux straw villains.
This linguistic problem begins with the almost universal misapplication of the very foundational terms thrown around in this debate. Coverage, care, insurance, etc, are jumbled up and used almost interchangeably. And yet they are very different things. Health insurance, for example, does not insure your health, nor was it ever intended to. Health care insurance, formerly called “medical insurance,” is merely an instrument of neutralizing risk. Financial risk, that is.
That’s right. Health insurance is a financial product, not a medical one. Just like homeowners insurance and life insurance and auto insurance. Insurance is a way to financially pool and spread and predict risk. At least, that was the reason for the industry to exist in the first place.
Health insurance was brought about by a need to insure a family’s assets against a dread disease requiring care so expensive it would wipe that family out financially. As a strictly financial planning endeavor, the issue never seemed to be discussed in terms of being a “right,” or in terms of “compassion.” It was simply financial planning.
But “medical insurance” as a component of financial planning has morphed into “health care” as a right for everyone in the new political parlance. And not only is the insurance a right, but the insurance should be “free” and it should cover everything from routine care visits to erectile dysfunction to ADHD to gender reassignment surgery.
Yes, gender reassignment surgery. I’m not sure even Ayn Rand saw that one coming.
Instead of being viewed as a financial instrument to keep a family from losing everything in an effort to pay for a cancer treatment or heart surgery, it has become viewed as an endless supply of other people’s money to pay for everything related to healthcare, so the family can buy every car, boat, flat screen, iPod and laptop they want with their own money.
And families that like to have other people pay for their needs so that they can invest in the toys are eas
y fodder for politicians promising more of the same. Especially when those liberal politicians use vaporous and misleading terms like “investing in health care” as part of a “stronger economy” and so on. This language enables the takers in society to simultaneously take what they want from others and feel good about their right to do so. This is the exact thing Obama was tapping into in Roanoke with “you didn’t build that.” He made that audience feel like they were both owed more and were morally superior to those who would be paying them what they were owed. This is madness. This is liberalism.
This mindset in health care has not only led to exorbitant costs to taxpayers to pay for government employee health plans, it has forced skyrocketing costs onto private plans which have to include all kinds of coverage mandated by various legislatures and well-connected unions. It even led to early release of criminals in California to pay for the health care of those who remained behind bars.
That is the ultimate liberal fantasy! Convicts released due to health care concerns. Liberals haven’t been this happy about an incarceration set up since Otis had his own keys to the Mayberry Jail.
The media would have you believe this is just more proof that the private sector “is failing us.” Alas, just like the mortgage and housing meltdown, in reality it was a private sector failing under the weight of unsustainable government mandates.
Which, of course, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the very worst thing we can do to solve it is to allow that very same government to have total control over it. The solution is to get back to the original intent of health insurance and an understanding of what it is. And more importantly, what it is not.
Health insurance, like any other insurance, is the spreading of financial risk. Period. The financial risk in health care is “the big one.” To only insure against that eventuality would not cost a lot. It would not require an army of paper pushers and mouse clickers at every step of your life. (Wait until we see how much fun that can be.) It is a rather simple actuarial equation.
Insuring this way would take the huge administrative burden off of the system. It would reduce costs dramatically. It would, by definition, encourage healthier habits. It would shrink the rolls of the uninsured. It would empower people, and they would not feel inclined to run to nanny government for their health care needs. This is why liberals do not want anything to do with an idea like this.
I will use the quick little example of my own family.
Several years ago our family paid about $12,000 a year for a health plan that included two adults and two children. With that, we had a typically confusing schedule of co-pays and deductibles that sometimes resulted in an illogical refusal of coverage on some procedures, but, of course, it covered a lot of things that are also illogical. And we get our prescriptions for something in the range of $10-50 on a co-pay, depending on what the drug was, and generic availability, etc.
Under this plan, with so much of our provider’s costs eaten up with paper pushing, figuring out confusing co-pay and deductible schedules, our catastrophic protection was not what I would like. We were still vulnerable to financial disaster had one of us needed care for something catastrophic. And thanks to government mandates, I had no other choice at the time. To get licensed in our state, companies are forced to cover certain items that dictate their entire pricing structure. Maximum limits were not as high as I thought we needed. Our out of pocket maximum was the $12,000 a year we paid plus the $2,500 deductible—or for those who took math at government school: $14,500 dollars plus the various co-pays. Let’s call it 17,000 bucks for confusing coverage that was not sufficient on the top end.
Now, however, we are enrolled in a high deductible plan. It’s very simple and very streamlined. We have all the coverage we need on the high end in case of the big cancer or heart issue, which is very comforting. Our deductible is $10,000, and our premium is about $400. So let’s do some math.
Our maximum now out of pocket is $14,800. More of that is paid to the pharmacies and to the doctors and less is paid to the insurance carrier, but our total exposure is still less. And, GASP, we are actually paying for what we use. Our trips to the drug store or to the doc in the box or to our normal doctors are quick and easy. We have far less paperwork and far less confusion, and yet far more catastrophic coverage and, as a bonus, we get better service. You would be amazed how pleasant pharmacists and doctors and their staff become when you take the burden of paperwork and long payment delays out of the equation. Sometimes the services and drugs are less expensive, as well.
Where did this savings come from? Not from reduced care and not from inferior drugs. It came from the reduced bureaucratic burden of paying for that care and those drugs. Of course, we are not unique. Many families are now doing this. The whole country could, more or less, and the entire system would be more streamlined and efficient and happier.
But alas, that would give people more freedom and less need for bureaucrats, which are two good reasons liberals will never go for it.
Obama Care will not provide any such efficiencies. Obama Care bureaucrats will just refuse or delay care to patients, and delay pay to providers, to feed their huge bureaucracies. This is what happens in Canada and in England. In other words, it’s like a typical government program because, well, it will become nothing but another typical government program. Except that it will be bigger than any other government program and will hold the power of life and death, not mere convenience, over your head.
Life and death? You betcha! I will let you interpret what “delaying” care means to elderly patients. For some strange reason the phrase “death panel” comes to mind.
What would be preferable to not only our family but to the “system” itself is the option for everybody to do as we have done. It really is no more complicated than that. Oh, it will be hard, because a lot of voters never bother to think through a little analogy like the auto insurance example—and they like to have their needs met by OPM—and they have convinced themselves it is a right. They become good liberal voters.
But complicated? No. It might even bring the cost of gender reassignment surgery down. And even our liberal friends would love that!
YMBAL’S #12
If you are one of the 37% of Americans who told Gallup you did not want to be rich…
If you support having a poor President to help us out of our economic problems…
If you refer to Mitt’s Cayman Islands accounts as “shadowy” while applauding Solyndra’s business model…
If you believe recycling is virtuous but chastity is not…
If you have ever seen the “good and welfare clause” in the Constitution…
If you hate corporations but have never figured out that all the celebrities you adore are paying lawyers big bucks to incorporate themselves…
If you believe gays can’t change but child molesters and murderers and other convicts can…
If you told your classroom that no particular group is responsible for the attacks of 9-11…
If any of the art you own includes both a crucifix and urine…
If you’ve ever gotten Earth Day and the Gay Pride parade day mixed up in your mind…
If you’ve ever worn your PETA sweatshirt to a pro-choice rally…
If you’ve ever protested the environmental impact of oil by exploding a pipeline and causing half a million gallons of oil to escape into the environment…
If you ever left your church because it refused to give the city land for a bike path…39
If you think humans should deal with their own waste “as close to the source as possible”…40
If you think it’s wise to have Barney Frank overseeing anything called Fannie…
If you think being successful means you are out of touch…
If you’ve ever claimed to be Cherokee on a college admissions form…
If you think people who inherit their money are more compassionate than those who earn it themselves…
If you are waitin
g for your share of the “Obama stash”…
If you are the mayor of any of the American cities to declare bankruptcy recently…
If you think it’s greedy to want to pay for your own healthcare, but not greedy to want someone else to pay for your healthcare…
If you sent a “die you bitch” tweet to Brad Pitts’ mother for criticizing Obama…
...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)
“We’re not gonna solve every difficult problem in terms of end of life care. A lot of that is going to have to be we as a culture and society making better decisions…at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that maybe this isn’t gonna help. Maybe you’re better off not taking the surgery, but taking the pain killer.”
—Barack Obama on CBS Evening News
“As the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.