Lost Dutchman Blog

Posted By Dutch on October 12, 2009

Don’t buy the lie that attacks on ObamaCare equate to a defense of our current system. We all have experienced denial of care by Insurance carriers, either directly within our family, or indirectly to a friend or a colleague.

The question is: Who gave these Insurance carriers the Power to decide what care we can receive? How did they come by such monopolistic control of our Health Care market? (I use the term “monopolistic” in the broadest sense, acknowledging that it is more oligopolistic than truly mono-polistic in nature.)

The answer is that our government created the current system.

There is no Free Market in health care, neither in the US, nor anywhere else in the World. Health Care is one of the most highly taxed, subsidized, and regulated services in the world.

Health Care Taxation
Insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and doctors are among the highest taxed businesses in America. American corporate taxes are 2nd Highest in the world, second only to Japan. (U.S. States Lead the World in High Corporate Taxes) Primary Care Physicians fall within the 3rd highest tax bracket (28%) for individual income tax payers. This bracket and those above are responsible for paying 80% of all Federal Tax Revenue collected from individual taxpayers. (Summary of Latest Federal Individual Income Tax Data and The Rich Pay More Taxes: Top 20 Percent Pay Record Share of Income Taxes)

Health Care Subsidies
Health Care is subsidized via Medicare, Medicaid, and even by tax exemption through employers. These unfair subsidies raise costs and prevent those without the benefit of employer sponsored plans or incomes too high for Medicaid, or ages too young for Medicare to pay exorbitant prices for care they do receive. Each of these subsidized systems underwrites and therefore hides the true cost of the care received. By under-charging members of these groups, demand is over-stimulated, leading to over-charging for those who are not members of these groups, especially the un-insured.

Health Care Regulations
Finally, both Federal and State mandates force Insurance Carriers to cover expenses far beyond catastrophic medical costs, diluting the cost-reducing benefit that pooling risk among thousands of clients inherently provides. Every sniffle, scratch, ache and pain is compounded into the system, each with an elevated cost for defensive medical practices to protect the care provider from expensive law-suits.

Blackmailing Drug Companies
Too often we hear the criticism that Global Free Trade is hurting American jobs, but the hidden truth is that foreign subsidies and price controls are the true source of our job losses and also the cause of the higher drug prices we in the US pay. It isn’t “Big Pharma”, but rather “Big Government Price Controls” in foreign countries that inflate drug prices in our country.

Our supposed allies (Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, etc.) threaten American drug companies who don’t cave in to their price demands with refusal to honor International patent law. Either American companies sell at the price they want, or they threaten to reverse engineer and manufacture and sell the new drug to their citizens without paying the American company that developed the drug. Consequently, the American company either acquiesces to the blackmail demands (and receives at least some compensation for their new drug), or they forego ALL compensation from that foreign market. (And if the foreign manufacturer chooses to sell outside of their home market, then they undercut the American company’s rightful sales even more!)

Even foreign drug companies, already under direct price controls within their home country, only succeed in recouping their development costs by selling their products in our Free Market. This effectively puts the US consumer in the position of subsidizing the development of all new drugs for the entire world. (Isn’t it enough that we already subsidize our allies militarily?) If the US institutes price controls into our Health Care Market, just who will pay for developing new drugs in the future? (Pharmaceutical Price Controls Abroad: An Unfair Trade Policy)

No market this heavily taxed, subsidized, and regulated and with as many unfair trade practices impinging on it domestically should ever be confused with a Free Market!

If you were trying to create the most awful system in the world for delivering health care to a population, one would be hard pressed to pick a worse one…except for the new one that the President and Congress are proposing now. It is so bad, that if it weren’t for the subsidies that our nation currently provides, via our free market, the rest of the world, which has already imposed this system on their populations, would be in even worse shape than they are now. And believe me, they are in terrible shape! (The Welfare State Made Britain Poor)

The burden that their health care systems place upon them completely excludes their ability to fund their own military. (Defense cuts reduce Britain’s value as an ally) Their acquiescence in the face of international terrorism is a direct consequence of this fact. The welfare state, especially the cost of healthcare, has bankrupted them.

So don’t let those Democrats and Liberals whom you know get away with making the false accusation that if you oppose the President’s plan, you are defending the awful system we have now. Tell them you’re just smart enough to know that when you find yourself stuck in the muck, the real solution is to get out of it, not wade in deeper!

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