Why Is Healthcare Legislation So Important?
Deborah Venable
02/26/10
Talk
about beating a dead horse! The
Democrats’ insistence on shoving this legislation to fundamentally transform
the American healthcare industry down the throats of American taxpayers, living
and not yet conceived, is truly beyond the pale!
Their
desperation is palpable. It is as if
they think it is their right as the party in power to sell what they couldn’t
sell back in the early nineties. Why
healthcare? Why is this legislation so
important? The figures they bat around
to define the “uninsured” in America are eerily close to the same ones they
stated back in the “Hillarycare” days.
Anyone else notice that?
So
there are supposedly some thirty to fifty-odd million uninsured Americans, who
have seemingly survived their uninsured status over the last 15 plus
years? Back then there were some
prominent Democrats, (such as senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D, NY) insisting
that the healthcare system was not broken, but the healthcare insurance system
most assuredly was. It should be noted
that he later regretted saying it out loud. Interesting. But then
Moynihan was always an interesting fellow.
There
is no way to pin down this number of uninsured, and there has never been a way
to do that. That could account for why
the estimations haven’t fluctuated out of this 20 million minimum to maximum in
over fifteen years. This is odd if you
consider the influx of legal – never mind illegal – immigrants that have taken
up residence here in that time period.
The
problem is that the healthcare insurance system even matters! If America has truly become a nation of
people who insist on insurance of any kind as a right, then we are doomed! Insurance used to be a commodity for the wealthy. Those who could afford to pass their assumed
risk onto someone else – for a price, did so to protect the wealth they had
already amassed. If you have no wealth,
you have nothing to “insure.”
Here’s
where the whole thing gets insidious, and where we can begin to answer the
question – why is healthcare legislation so important? Guaranteeing universal health insurance
coverage is a progressive idea and it is time we realize that most progressive
ideas are brewed in a Marxist teapot.
A
brief
history
of health insurance in the United States places the first instance of a group
policy offered back in 1847 by Massachusetts Health Insurance of Boston. The idea of health insurance didn’t really
gain any ground until the Civil War, and on an individual basis until the first
policies were offered around 1890. It
wasn’t until the early 20th century that the larger life insurance
companies got into the health insurance act.
The
real precursor of health insurance was more commonly known as sickness
insurance,
which primarily provided a supplementary income, much like today’s disability
insurance, and was not concerned with paying medical practitioners for their
services. Of course medicine had not
become institutionalized like it is today.
Most care was provided within individual homes.
It
is interesting to note here that with the modernization of medical practice,
complete with licensing of training and formalization of medical specialties,
all interwoven with increasing government control, prices and treatment quality
began to spiral upwards. It is no
wonder that the insurance industry was ready, willing, and able to step onto
the stage of necessity literally being created for it. Enter the real regulators, government insurance reformers. That ever-widening void between patient and
medical provider was established following carefully laid plans of a power
hungry, progressive type government.
The
goal of mandated universal healthcare coverage, as repugnant as it may be to
liberty loving Americans, sounds so good to progressive thinkers because they
have always considered themselves above the fray of the little people’s
struggle to survive. The poor, the
underprivileged, the minorities in our “unfair” free capitalist system need the
protection of the ever-vigilant, liberal, progressive “free thinkers” to protect
them from the evil, conservative rich.
Just
how far reaching are the controls on healthcare and healthcare insurance? It just about touches every facet of the
individual’s ability to protect his own sovereignty.
For
years healthcare coverage has played an all too important role in employer/employee
relationships. Decisions to accept
and/or keep a job one might detest often rests on the “value” of the employment
package, and health insurance coverage can figure at the top of that
consideration. Business decisions,
which should be the sole responsibility of those owning and running the
business, must pass the liability test many times determined by what kind of
“package” the business must offer potential employees. In times of fixed or capped salaries, the
benefits package may be the only way for an employer to attract valuable
employees. The quality of the health
coverage in that package is always hard to define in real terms – and it
fluctuates between times of open enrollment.
The
bottom line in the insurance business – insurance of any kind – is that nobody
wants to pay. Customers are simply
coerced by circumstance to pay premiums they feel are too high for a product
that severely limits their choices. The
insurance companies will grab at any straw or loophole to avoid paying a
claim. Meanwhile the provider and
receiver of such services as medical care seldom meet each other over an open
checkbook. The massive healthcare
insurance business has not alleviated the one thing that would drastically
reduce medical costs – in fact it has perpetuated the disabling threat of tort
lawsuits that every medical provider must be wary of. Worse still, it also feeds at the ever-widening trough of
providing additional coverage to the healthcare providers so they can stay in
business.
Insurance
is one big conflict of interest industry, and it should not enjoy the place at
the table of individual sovereignty that it does. However, sprinkle the salt of crushing government control over
all facets of the healthcare industry, and you have a poisoned public – unable
and unwilling to make the most personal of decisions for themselves.
Listen
to this 1961 audio of Ronald Reagan speaking out against
socialized medicine. This was before
Reagan was even governor of California, but the push was on even then for
mandated universal healthcare coverage.
For a good understanding of the timeline for the Hillary healthcare debate, this page
is valuable research.
The American public has been carefully indoctrinated and groomed to expect government to assume all their risk. If we ever quit fighting against it, our fate will surely be sealed. That’s why it is so important. That’s why there is always an urgency for those who wish to seal that fate to pass something, anything, that is a foot in the door. Individual American sovereignty is at stake – just as it always has been.