Repeal the Un-American Healthcare Law

What is being planned is not and cannot be “deficit neutral”. It will end up costing taxpayers billions if not trillions of dollars.

What is being planned will not introduce “competition” or “choice”, but will in fact decrease both.

And what is being planned will introduce a governmental bureaucratic nightmare in which privacy concerns will be completely disregarded as the IRS and others trade your information without your consent to ensure you’re not “gaming” the system or failing to follow orders.

Alter is suggesting that it is a violation of individual civil rights, akin to discriminating against someone on the basis of race to deny one insurance because one is sick.

This is ludicrous on a number of levels, but that it fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of insurance is one of its worst features. Insurance is meant to protect against the expense of unknown outcomes by paying a small premium based on the statistical probability that one will suffer such an outcome. However, if one of the outcomes already exists then the insurance premium would simply be equal to the cost of treatment since the probability of payment is 1:1. …

In briefest terms, health care cannot be a “right” because it is entirely dependent on someone else providing it to you. “Rights” do not ever involve taking from someone and giving to someone else. In order to believe otherwise, one would have to believe that doctors are actually slaves who can legally be commanded to fulfill one’s “right” to health care or suffer the consequences.

But there is a fundamental problem with our current debate. We are arguing over whether we should keep the system we have, or move to a system that sets us on the path to a single-payer system. But those aren’t the only alternatives. There is another option that is being lost in this debate. The democrats don’t want to mention it for ideological reasons. The Republicans don’t mention it because of…well…incompetent buffoonery, I guess.

The alternative, of course, is to make the case that our current system costs so much, and is so distorted, because of government interference. We have a mixed system of health care funding in which the government’s intervention imposes a wide range of unnecessary costs. So our choice is not to keep what we have, or eliminate the administrative overhead by turning it all over to the government. The third choice is to return to a free market in health care.