The Story On Medical Insurance

The story on medical insurance starts with how WW II wage and price controls led defense contractors to offer health insurance as additional, unregulated income to attract workers from other industries since the wage and price controls prohibited paying higher wages. Congress exempted health insurance from taxation too, making it all the more attractive. Once labor unions—which the New Deal turned into government-enforced labor cartels—got a taste of tax-free health insurance they began to demand not just more of it, but an ever-increasing share of their income in it. The pro-union government policies of the 1950s and especially 1960s, and reduced competition from the European companies laid low by the war, meant that large American corporations gave in to these demands.

By the late 1960s, when government started inflating the money supply to pay for the Great Society social programs and the Vietnam War without overtly raising taxes (inflation is a covert tax on your money), large, tax-free health insurance polices had become the norm for Big Labor. All that money being diverted into health care had the predictable effect of raising health care prices relative to the prices of other goods and service. When the stagflation of the 1970s pushed millions of Americans into higher tax brackets while lowering their real (inflation-adjusted) pre-tax earnings, they looked at Big Labor and started demanding the same sorts of benefits. When these other Americans got a taste of tax-free medical insurance, they wanted more too. It took a while, but where once very few people had health insurance and nobody needed it for a simple annual physical, decades later almost every takes it for granted and believes they need it. (I have actually survived without it, but that’s another story.) All that additional spending on health care naturally raised health care prices relative to other goods and services even more than Big Labor’s health benefits did.

As tax-free health insurance became more widespread, it also mutated from health insurance into prepaid medical care. Unlike real insurance, where if you use it you end up paying higher rates, with much so-called health insurance, if you don’t use it, you lose it, and within certain parameters you do not pay more. I, for instance, have exhausted both the office visit benefit and the diagnostic benefit of the half-hearted health insurance that I buy through my private university as a part-timer there. My rates will not rise as a result of my using my benefits. If I were, on the other hand, to smash up my 12-year-old car, I would get almost no money from the insurance company (because of the age of the car and because the policy, as real insurance, has a large deductible) and they would almost certainly raise my rates (assuming I’m at fault). (In Denver I had a minor accident where I caught the side-stripping of my car on the wall of a parking garage. Repairing it cost just under that the amount for which Colorado law would allow them to raise my premiums, so they cancelled my policy instead! Thank you state of Colorado for pricing me out of the market! The state of VA did the same thing for private health insurance for me which is part of why I went without insurance entirely for a while—actually a couple of whiles.)

The widespread development of prepaid heath care has predictably driven up prices of medical care relative to prices of other goods and services. It’s very much like the impact of student loans: a cat chasing its tail; the faster it runs, the faster the tail runs away from it.

Health insurance also suffers from state as well as federal regulation. If you have several preexisting conditions, for instance, the natural response of an insurance company would be to 1. Exclude the preexisting conditions or 2. Charge more for preexisting conditions. When I first went to apply for an individual health insurance plan, I had three pre-existing conditions. Aetna, which so far as I can tell seems to be the best of the over-regulated lot of big health insurance (pre-paid health) companies, increases the base premium by 25% for each preexisting condition. So for my three conditions they would have been willing to write me a policy with a premium 75% higher than the base. I would have paid it too, as my family was willing to help out (I couldn’t have afforded even the base at that time). My family was willing to cough up the $450 per month to have me insured. The state of Virginia, however, in its infinite liberal compassion, “protected” me from “price gouging” by limiting insurance companies to a 50% increase in the premium over the base. Aetna couldn’t legally charge me for all three preexisting conditions, so the VA price control, rather than protecting me, simply priced me out of the market. Instead of having a policy at 175% of base, I had no policy at 150% of base. Neat, huh?

And at the federal level during the Clinton years liberals came up with a “solution” for my lack of heath care: they passed a law (called HIPPA) allowing states to create state monopolies for “high-risk” patients. The law allows either a fascist monopoly, wherein the state government grants the monopoly to a state-regulated private company, or a communist monopoly, wherein the state offers the insurance itself. In VA we have the fascist version, and VA happened to have granted the monopoly to Aetna. So VA wouldn’t let Aetna offer me a normal policy for $450/month, but it would let Aetna offer me a high-risk policy for $4500/month. I kid you not.

There is another aspect to the rise of medical prices relative to other goods and services. As real incomes per person rise, as they have done in every year in the industrialized countries since the Industrial Revolution except during recessions and depressions (so that the average real income has risen about 25 times, or 2400%, in the US since 1700), people can afford not just to buy more and better food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health care and entertainment, but shift more of their income from food, clothing and shelter to transportation, health care and entertainment. Even for a compulsive overeater in the grips of the disease there’s some sort of point of satiation (called a bliss point in economics), where more food or better quality food doesn’t appeal to the person. While the bliss points for clothing and shelter might range much higher, it’s still true that as income levels have skyrocketed over the past 200+ years, people have shifted proportionately from good, clothing and shelter to transportation, entertainment and medical care. The improvements in medical care have been profound. At the turn of the 19th century, average life expectancy in America was about 55 years. Most likely you and I, had we survived to age 49, wouldn’t plan on lasting much longer. My 81-year-old mother most likely would have been long in her grave. My dad probably would have died 30 years ago rather than 3 years ago. The leading cause of death among woman was childbirth. People would have regarded the tragic death of my high school friend Margie from pregnancy complications as commonplace, not the rare tragedy that it was thanks to our not having socialism destroy medical innovation in America. Men on average lived longer than women, even though women rarely smoked. (Indeed one of the perverse effects of 1960s/1970s feminism, which took smoking as a symbol of liberation, was to reduce the average number of years by which women had come to outlive men, although the gap remained around 7 years or so last I checked.) We pay more for medical care in part because we get far more than we used to, just as we pay more for entertainment because we get far more than we used to.

I don’t hear too many complaints about entertainers making too much money or about the un-affordability of sporting events—and certainly not to the degree where most liberals want the government to seize control of such things. Americans voluntarily choose to spend billions of dollars annually on entertainment instead of health care. At the same time it’s natural that as we get higher incomes we spend an increasing share of treatments that extend our lives and improve its quality. People now routinely spend millions on relief from ailments like allergies and arthritis with which people once just suffered. Cancer used to be an automatic death sentence when I was a kid, so much so that I can recall the days when people were actually afraid to say the word lest just saying it might invoke the disease. Now millions routinely live for years with various types of cancer. Probably some day the treatments that now sometimes cure and often at least slow the cancer will seem crude and barbaric, and we will have much better treatments. The more people spend on these things—whether treatments to remove allergies or treatments to cure cancer—the better they’ll get if scientists and companies are left to do research and respond to patient demands rather than political demands.

The British National Health Service provides a good, brief example of what happens when government seizes control of health care: Britain actually has fewer hospital beds now than it did before government seized control of health care, and for years after we had dialysis routinely in America, British doctors lied to patients with kidney failure, telling the patients that there was nothing medical science could do for them. That’s what socialist medical care—whether fascist or communist—does to doctors: it turns them into liars for the state and stifles medical innovation. The irony under socialist health care is that it forces nearly everyone to have the same lousy care—everyone except the politicians who give themselves better health care, and the very rich who can afford to spent the money to travel to a more market-oriented health care system, like ours (or like ours was before ObamaCare) and pay for good health care.

It’s a perverse trait of humans that if someone invents something that we really, really love we often resent them for it and demand that government seize control of it and give it to use for free. Public transportation in the big cities, for instance, started out entirely private. People found it so useful that they soon clamored to have government first regulate its prices, and then seize control of it entirely. We see the same sort of thing happening now with health care. Sure, government’s labor, taxation and monetary policies have artificially inflated the price of medical care relative to all other goods, but ultimately it’s the wondrous and constantly-improving state of medical care that sets our bliss point for medical care astronomically high, so that as our incomes rise it will continue to be natural for us to spend an increasing share of our income on health care just as we do on entertainment. Setting aside the inflation of medical prices from bad government policy, it’s actually a good thing that we can afford to pay spend increasingly-larger shares of our income on increasingly-better health care.

Obama and the Working Poor

Thanks to the passage of Obama's fascist health care plan, my insurance company raised the premium on my half-hearted basic health insurance.  Since the fascist health care plan imposes so many new regulations and taxes, however, my insurance company dropped the best of the three optional supplementary insurance plans, which I elected when I first started teaching at my online university, so with lower coverage my overall premium actually went down.  So my paycheck actually contained an extra $12 today!  So I'm paying a tiny bit less to get only one-third the health care benefits.  And people say that Obama isn't helping the working poor!

Gallup: Obama & Democrats at All-Time Lows

With the majority of Americans opposed to Obama's imposition of fascist health care on us, it's not surprise that passage of ObamaCare hasn't stopped his downward slide in the polls:

Gallup: Obama Numbers at All-Time Low
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/obama-gallup-poll-numbers/2010/04/12/id/355405?s=al&promo_code=9BC3-1

nor that Democrats have also reached their all-time low in the polls:
Gallup: Democrats' Approval at Historic Low
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/gallup-democrats-approval-healthcare/2010/04/12/id/355438

and are trailing in reelection races for November--where they haven't already announced that (because they're trailing) that they're retiring. In the wake of Scott Brown's upset in the great state of Taxachusetts--arguably the most liberal state in the union--probably no seat is safe for Democrats in the wake of their imposition of fascist health care, with its taxes, cuts in medical care, regulations, and prison sentences. As the second story above indicates, Democrats on spring recess are scattering like cockroaches exposed to the light, largely refusing to meet with (angry) constituents who opposed ObamaCare. The real question right now is: how much more damage to American can the liberal Democrats do before those (angry) constituents throw the bums out in November? I think we can expect the Democrats to continue their slash-and-burn tactics to impose as much government control as possible between now and then, lying, cheating and stealing as they did when the House pretended to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare and Obama pretended he could amend legislation by executive order in promising to pro-life Democrats that despite the Senate version's funding of abortions, Obama wouldn't fund any abortions. But hey, welcome to the Democrats, the party of compassion!

Petition to Seat Scott Brown Immediately

Now that Republican Scott Brown has won the US Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for decades, Democrats in the Senate have lost their 60-seat filibuster-proof majority and so can no longer pass Obama's fascist health care plan with its mandates, taxes, fines and criminal prison sentences. Or have they?

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might try to delay the seating of Scott Brown until after the House-Senate Conference Committee sends back a fascist health care bill that reconciles the Senate version with the even worse House version. Reid doesn't care much that a majority of American people oppose the fascist health care bills and that even in Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the republic, thousands of liberal Democrats who voted for Obama came out to vote against Obama's fascist health care bills. Reid himself now runs a serious risk of getting tossed out by the voters of Nevada in his 2010 reelection bid, so he's likely to conduct a scorched-earth policy and impose as much fascist government control on us as possible before Nevadans put an end to his legislative reign of terror and lop off his political head.

To help oppose fascist health care you can sign a petition to demand the immediate seating of Scott Brown at http://www.countryfirstpac.com/seathimnow/?initiativekey=3JTODVIZSRFF. Reid might not be listening, but some other Democrat Senators are: already last night, Virginia's US Senator, Jim Webb, a Democrat with a liberal voting record but a moderate reputation, stated that no vote should on health care reform should take place before the Senate seats Brown. Webb won his Senate seat in 2006 by only three-tenths of a percent against conservative Republican George Allen, and only because 1. The liberal media managed to turn Allen's non-racial "macaca" comment into a racial slur; 2. Voters sick of losing Bush's then-losing policies in Iraq wanted to win; 3. Enough voters were foolish enough to believe that Democrats would win rather than try to cut and run; and 4. The liberal media managed to paint Webb as a "moderate" or even "conservative" Democrat because he'd once served as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Reagan (but also called Reagan a fool, a fact that the liberal media loved but hid from you). Webb knows then that he's skating on thin ice. He routinely votes a liberal line, but without much media attention routinely gets away with it. On fascist health care (on which he voted to kill the Republican filibuster) though there's far too much media attention, and he knows that he's in serious danger of not getting reelected in 2012.

So while the petition probably won't affect Reid directly, it can certainly affect Democrat Senators like Webb and others from so-called "purple states" where voters could easily toss out the Democrat Senators with moderate reputations revealed to be liberal and not the moderates they pretended to be. So let's do everything possible to drive the wooden stake through the heart of Obama's fascist health care plan and sign the petition to seat Scott Brown immediately at http://www.countryfirstpac.com/seathimnow/?initiativekey=3JTODVIZSRFF. I've already signed it, and I hope you will too.

But Liberals HATED The Taliban!!

Some liberals, apparently, don't feel too happy with Obama right now, even though he had the lowest (most liberal) rating from the National Taxpayer's Union of any member of the US Senate. Liberal Democrats, it turns out, now want ONLY the "public option" or communist health care, and don't want something with even a little less government, like the fascist health care plan proposed by Hillary a scant 16 years ago that they all supported.

If that's not bad enough, some liberal Democrats don't feel too happy about Obama actually trying to destroy the Taliban in Afghanistan. You might recall that it was Hollywood liberals who, in the 1990s, make such a big fuss over the Taliban and how they treat women as property. Well liberals, what did you THINK was going to get rid of the Taliban--singing "Kumbaya" and holding candlelight vigils? What do a bunch of mass-murdering Muslim monsters care about your songs and candles? They're MURDERERS. Really liberals, if you'd try to think rationally a little more and emote a little less we'd all be better off. So Obama is doing what you WANTED him to do--getting rid of the Taliban--and you want to dump him for someone even further left. Good luck with that.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/afghanistan/20_say_pull_all_troops_out_of_afghanistan_immediately


http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/september_2009/does_obama_face_a_2012_challenge_in_his_own_party

Obama Reaches New Low in Daily Tracking Poll (-13)

Apparently accusing all the elderly, Medicare-receiving protesters of ObamaCare as unpatriotic, anti-religious right-wing radicals did not actually work for Obama and his liberal media proxies, and so his poll numbers continue to worsen, as Republicans widen their lead in the Generic Congressional Ballot. Members of the liberal media, who loved Scott Rasmussen when his polls showed Obama leading before the election and popular after it, have begun attacking Rasmussen for continuing to publish his polls now that they show Obama's growing unpopularity. I can't say I feel surprise, since liberalism, which simultaneously holds that all moral systems are equally valid and that a moral system that rejects homosexual marriage and abortion isn't valid, doesn't bother much with consistency anyway.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/generic_congressional_ballot

Support for ObamaCare Falls to New Low

After all the demonization of protesters by Obama and his liberal proxies, opposition to his socialist seizure of our health care has risen to from a plurality to a majority. While predictably 69% of Democrats favor the plan and 79% of Republicans oppose it, a stunning 62% of unaffiliated voters oppose it too, demonstrating that on health care socialization, Democrats remain radically at odds with the rest of America.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/august_2009/support_for_congressional_health_care_reform_falls_to_new_low

Dodd Keeps Latest Health Care Bill Secret

Dodd keeping his latest socialist health care bill secret even from other Senators means that it must be REALLY bad. Just when you thought ObamaCare couldn't get any worse...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203946904574301050879872972.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

ObamaCare's Contradictions

Apparently Obama just can't keep himself from talking out of both sides of his mouth. It seems to be a compulsion, and perhaps he should resigned and go spend the next four years getting treated for compulsive lying.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203550604574360541357223298.html?mod=djemEditorialPage