Graves Is Gravely Wrong On Obamacare Being Free Market Reform
A free market health care reform doesn’t need the IRS to enforce it.
On Sunday, the DFL candidate facing Congresswoman Bachmann was on the Late Debate with Jack & Ben. One thing that Mr. Graves dropped in the interview was how he thought Obamacare was founded on Free Market principles.
There is some merit to the notion that if everyone has something, it will produce cheaper and better products through competition. Hmm, competition….. Free market would mean something like: there would be tiers of products like, entry level Yugos and Specs all the way up to Maserati’s and Humvees.
In the case of health insurance, if you had less income, and your employer didn’t provide a group option, you’d at least be able to get emergency care for breaks or catastrophic diseases if that was all you could afford. But if you want to get that nose job or have your forehead stretched to look like Pelosi, it wouldn’t be covered. Or for people who think they are healthy they could buy a simple plan to cover emergencies. The point is that people could shop around and look for the best deals and the plans that suit their needs and desires.
Yeah, there would be room for a free market reform to Health Care, and we could use some changes to our Insurance system, but Obamacare is far from free market. In fact in a lot of people’s opinions, the problem with our HealtH Insurance system before Obamacare wasn’t the lack of Government intervention, it was that Government had already tinkered and messed it up.
With Obamacare, there is no choice on what you buy or from who or from where. One of the costliest things in Health Care is people going to Hospitals for basic care for sniffles or sore tummies, and such. If people were required to have basic coverage for such things, they wouldn’t go unless they had to, but more importantly, they would cover their own costs with their own premiums so they’d seek out the cheapest option. They’d visit the minute clinic not Hospital for a cold because if they didn’t their own insurance would be hit for the exponential cost differences. They’d remove the politicians and bureaucrats, but even more importantly, they’d become educated consumers and start taking responsibility of heir own care since they’d be paying for it. They’d start to pay attention because if they didn’t eventually they’d run out of money. But when you have someone else paying the bills, you won’t think twice about how much it costs.
The point is a free market reform for Health Care looks more like Auto Insurance than Obamacare’s thousands and thousands of pages of law, mandates, and determinations by the Secretary. Come on, we all know Obamacare is the trojan horse to destroy private health insurance so that Government has no other option but to implement a single payer Government run system. The reason Obamacare is not anywhere near “free market” stems from the fact that it mandates exactly what you have to buy and how the companies sell the dictated product. No choice, no options, no variables. One size fits all. That’s pretty much the textbook definition of the opposite of free market.
The left is trying to say that Obamacare is simply what The Heritage Foundation recommended. That’s not true. They supported the notion of a mandate, but that’s it. Its the rest of Obamacare that makes it nothing like a free market reform. The tax, the dictates, the mandates, the defined coverage, the lack of choice, and top down controls all make Obamacare a reform, but nothing close to a free market reform.
The Government does’t need to hire an army of tax agents to enforce a free market based reform. And the Government doesn’t expressly lay out the parameters and scope of a free market plan.
And then there’s that whole reason the Supreme Court denied the suit that it was UnConstitutional, Obamacare is a tax, not Health Insurance reform. Mr. Graves supports the largest Tax Increase on the most people and businesses in the history of the United States.
And one last fact before you leave. The Democrats and allies in the media are saying Obamacare will reduce the deficit. The CBO’s projections during the limited debate before Obamacare passed Congress used 10 years of the Obamacare taxes, but only 6 years of the spending. The Obamacare taxes kick in around 2014, but the full programs expenditures don’t come on line until 2018.
Oh, and there’s also that whole waiver thing that also debunks the whole free market argument.
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