Problems with the Senate Healthcare Bill

To be honest, I don’t think a relatively short blog post can really do justice to all of the qualms I have with the Senate healthcare bill. However, there are a couple of major concerns I have that I would like to draw attention to.

First of all, I want to make something clear. I am not a conspiracy theorist who assumes that every time a politician says something I disagree with, he’s lying. Whether or not something has a factual basis to it, I’m usually willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a mistake. But I am convinced more and more that I am being lied to about healthcare. Time and time again, I have heard Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama get up in front of millions of Americans and say that if you already have healthcare, you won’t be affected by their proposed reforms and that nobody is obligated to buy into the government system.

Why, then, does the Senate bill place a 40% excise tax on family healthcare plans over $21,000 and individual plans over $8,000? They are punishing Americans for buying insurance that apparently is too good. Why does it matter if I have an expensive “Cadillac” plan? If any of them have ever studied basic microeconomics, then they would know that when an excise tax is imposed on a good, the consumer always bears the better part of the financial burden. They are deliberately making something that is already expensive less affordable. And they really expect me to believe that they aren’t trying to drive people away from private insurance? That is a blatant lie. These excise taxes are unjust and insulting and they ought to be criminal. There isn’t much I can do to keep them from providing government insurance to others, but the day they start screwing with my privately provided insurance is the day I pack up for Mexico.

Not only that, but how counter-intuitive is this kind of tax? Obviously, they are trying to keep people from spending more money on healthcare. But the punishment is a 40% increase in cost. So their way of punishing Americans for having something too expensive is by making it more expensive. Where is the logic behind that?

So that’s problem number one and frankly, it’s a big problem. So here’s my next huge concern. I have heard these reforms justified countless times on the basis that big private insurance companies are heartless, wretched, greedy, bloodthirsty bastards who don’t care about anything but padding their own wallets at the end of the day and who knowingly and intentionally raise premium prices to levels that are ridiculously and unnecessarily high.

So, then, I raise the question: “Really?”

If it’s true that these awful, mean, evil people are raising your premiums to ridiculous levels for no reason other than to increase profit, then you assume that another company, or perhaps the government, could provide the same coverage for a significantly lower price and still be self-sustained. Why is it, then, that the government needs to subsidize the cost of providing this care with taxes imposed on expensive private plans and on the highest tax bracket? If private insurance is really that unnecessarily expensive then the government should be able to provide a cheaper option financed by nothing other than what the patients pay into the system. But of course, that’s not possible. That kind of system would implode. And yet somehow, the private insurers are expected to abide by these outrageous standards.

This is a microcosm of a much greater concern I have with government healthcare. That is, the fact that the government doesn’t have to play by the same rules as the rest of the industry. There is no way a government can enter an industry to “make it more competitive” (as the Democratic Congressional leadership has repeatedly claimed, in spite of common sense) without playing by market rules. Of course they can provide a cheaper service, because they have theoretically unlimited funding to do so. How can private industry possibly compete with that? Private insurance is doomed to fail unless the government can play by market rules. Other insurers can’t draw from tax dollars to lower premiums and they can’t impose tax punishments on other insurers who don’t do what they want. So why can the government do it? They have an incredibly unfair advantage.

In short, my problems stem from Democratic leadership deliberately lying to cover their desire to force government healthcare upon the entire populace. And that isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s based on common sense.