Comments on Obama's Health Care Speech...

One of the really nice things about being in the radical middle is that I am allowed to try and embrace the best of ideas from both the left and the right.  My inclinations are somewhat to the conservative side of the fence, but frankly, the conservatives can be ass-stupid sometimes.  I just find that in a few more instances, the liberals can be ass-stupider. 

That sort of goes along with the territory, as the definition of conservatism generally means "conserving" an existing order and liberalism generally involves tinkering with the formula.  The liberals have the harder job:  trying to make improvements on systems that have been proven throughout the entire course of human history.

As some who know me already know, I support Obama's government health care reform.  In fact, I support some of the more radical options including a government-option.  My preferrence would be a Medicare for all provision that allowed every American the ability to enroll in the same health insurance program that our seniors do.

I have some personal perspective on this.  I didn't have health insurance for a few years during my 20s.  Fortunately, I was young and healthy, but I also had to pay for things like an ambulance ride to the ER when a little kid cut my wrist open with an ice-skate.  I also remember removing my stitches with a swiss army knife because I couldn't afford a doctor visit to have a physician do it.

Also, as a small business owner, I simply cannot afford to provide health-insurance to my employees the way we currently fund health care in this country.  I know that a government overhaul that included adding health benefits would be expensive to me.  However, my hope is that it would be possible, which it isn't right now.

We are paying 2 to 3 times more, per patient, on health care in this country than any other industrialized country.  I know that providing health insurance to every American will be expensive, but it makes sense that the following areas are areas for improvement:

1.  Trial lawyers are not improving the health of americans.  Threat of litigation drives insurers and physicians to perform unnecessary tests and procedures and adds to the cost of health care.  Trial lawyers would argue that without the ability to sue, doctors would not perform good medicine.  However, if this were true, we'd have the best medicine the world had to offer.  We don't.  In many cases, our health outcomes are actually WORSE than those of other industrialized nations.

2.  We pay 2 to 3 times more per patient on health care in the US than any other industrialized country.  The medical industry is remarkably non-standardized.  There are centers of excellence that produce superior health outcomes at lower costs.  The Mayo Clinic is one such center.  We need to do a better job of proliferating best-practices through the health care industry.

3.  The pharmaceutical companies are thieves and are stealing from you just because you're American.  They want to destroy the American economy and to prove it, they're charging you about twice what most other industrialized countries pay for pharmaceuticals.  They're charging you 20 or 30 or 40 times what they charge in the developing world?  Why?  Because we'll pay it. 

All we have to do is say we won't pay it, just like everybody else in the world has done, and they'll stop.  Trouble is, their lobbyists are constantly trying to protect their right to steal from Americans.  So far, they're doing a great job.  Any meaningful reform of American health care would include constraints on pharmaceutical costs.  I'm not advocating that we pay any less than any other industrialized country.  I just don't think that paying 50% or 100% or 150% more should be allowed. 

There are other ways we could control costs:  for instance, insisting that we can import pharmaceuticals from any other country in a fee-trade zone.  That way, we could import drugs from Mexico and save 80% or so.  They've already retaliated by threatening not to sell pharmaceuticals to any country that exports them to the United States.  We should counter-threaten to deny the US market, entirely, to any pharmaceutical company that violates free-trade agreements and takes punative action against free-trade partners.  Personally, I wish our legislators would use threats like this as a club to get big pharma to stop trying to destroy the United States.

If I had my way, I'd take every major executive from every major pharmaceutical company one-on-one into a locked room for 30 minutes and show them the error of their ways.  These are America-hating, profiteering organizations who are trying to bankrupt us.  Just us.  Not Canada.  Not Japan.  Not Great Brittain.  Not Germany or France.  Just the United States of America. 

4.  Although aggregate costs will rise moderately, individual health policy cost should, in theory, go down.  Why?  Because we've got a terrible free-rider problem in America.  Employers (like me) who don't offer health insurance benefit if spouses of our workers have health insurance.  ANOTHER COMPANY is subsidizing the health-care of some of my employees. 

Why, you might ask, don't I insure my employees and right this wrong?  One of the main reasons is that I can't afford to subsidize the health-care of SOME OTHER COMPANY'S employees. 

Also, as we all know, uninsured people will sometimes delay care until they have to be taken to a hospital where they receive the most expensive health-care we can offer:  the emergency room.  With regular access to a physician, we may be able to avoid some of these $1,000 ER visits by providing a few $80 periodic checkups.

Overall, I'm not naive.  I know this will cost money.  However, we're already insuring our nation's most expensive patients:  the elderly and the poor. 

When my business was very new, I had a person who worked in my office who made $8 or $9 an hour.  She supported 2 kids and a worthless sperm-donor baby daddy.  They had better health-care at lower copays and deductibles, than my family did under the plan I was paying for, myself. 

So, the idea that "government health care" is worse than what we're getting through private insurance is laughable, in my opinion.

One problem occurred to me as Obama said these words about detractors of Ted Kennedy, a long-time supporter of a government health-care plan:  "In their mind, his passion for universal health care was nothing more than a passion for big government."

Trouble is, it isn't like that.  The problem with Kennedy is that people perceive that his passion for big government was simply manifesting itself at the moment in a passion for universal health care.

I believe health care is a necessary and important government service.  However, the left's willingness to tax everybody to death and try to provide a wasteful government solution to every problem has left people wary.

On this, I will only say:  let's not shoot the messenger in this case.  Not every government program is bad.  Yes, if the left weren't so willing to tax every possible penny away from us, and to waste our money on pointless, stupid and useless government programs, there wouldn't be such a "boy who cried wolf" aspect to this entire debate. 

Which leads me to the next resonant thing Obama said:

"the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years - less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration".

At first, I cringed.  The fundamental need of Democrats to demonize and punish successful people is one of the more embarassing things about the Democratic party, in my opinion.  They may as well come out and say, "We're losers.  We'll always be losers.  We can't achieve anything.  But we can get together and drag down anybody who won't be a loser just like us."

Putting aside the class-warfare implications of his statement, though, there are things that are sometimes worth the cost.  Again, yes, if the Democrats didn't have such an extensive history of simply taxing for the sake of taxing, and spending for the sake of spending, they would be taken more seriously.  However, the Republicans, under George Bush, were guilty of the same thing, just to a much smaller extent. 

I can't help but believe that the one and only government initiative that I can see justifying a rollback of tax cuts, or even justifying an increase of taxes, is the ability to finally provide some health-care security to everybody, and to extend coverage to the 30 or 40 million Americans who currently lack it.

It was refreshing to see Obama finally take the lead on this issue.  He made a grave error by turning this thing over to congressional Democrats to sort out.  Granted, he was trying not to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton health initiative, but handing his program over to a bunch of special-interest whores was a bad idea from the start.  I'd be surprised if more than a dozen of them gave a damn about health care for anybody.  The few things they managed to produce were written entirely by lobbyists.  For example:  the number of proposals that preserved big pharma's ability to destroy America were astounding.  The provisions that made everybody sacrifice, except the labor unions, was impressive.  And not one single proposal to curtail the cost of litigation was brought forth.

I trust Obama.  I think he's an honest man and a brilliant man.  I don't agree with his politics a lot of the time, but I think he's smart enough to learn. 

Most of all, I trust him more than I trust the lobbyists who own Washington.  So, I'm glad he's taking charge of this debte.