Healthcare Insurance: Solution or Problem?

The Jury is still out, but it looks like Obamacare is going down the toilet. Good riddance. It’s a Frankenstein monster which would only make the administration of health care in America worse than it is now.

Collectivists won’t give up easily though. They want a universal health care law.  Had Obamacare been set up like Social Security in the first place, they might have had their way. They might still get their way. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, whether we like them or not, have been held constitutional. So we might end up with universal health care after all.

Universal health care, to a leftist, means that the cost of everyone’s medical care should be furnished essentially by everyone else. In other words, healthy people must be forced to pay for the health care of unhealthy people, and poor people must have the same quality of health care as rich people. Anyone knows, though, that there is not enough health care on the planet to satisfy that demand.

Leftist’s think that if they can just force everyone to buy health insurance their dreams for universal health care would come true. But why insurance? Insurance only exacerbates the problem. Insurance increases the demand for medical services. Insurance for every medical expense is the primary reason why heath care is so outrageously expensive today. If we got groceries the same way we now get health care, the cost of food would explode.

If everyone had full coverage health insurance for every ailment, including preexisting conditions, the cost of health care and health care insurance premiums would spiral totally out of control. No one who has health care insurance gives a damn about keeping costs low as long as an insurance company is paying the tab. If they’ve paid premiums, they what their money’s worth. That’s human nature.

On top of that, insurance companies have their own high costs of administration. They have to pay armies of employees to administer the insurance and still operate at a profit. They are essentially a middleman in the health care business. Why pay a middleman for every item of medical expense, plus a substantial amount more for profit? Insurance is the biggest drag on the administration and costs of health care.

If congress must pass a universal health care law, it should first eliminate health insurance all together, except for catastrophic coverage, (that’s the original logical purpose for insurance anyway), and in those situations the deductibles should be high enough to discourage people from trying to milk the system.

Since premiums for such catastrophic insurance are relatively low, the cost of medical insurance would be affordable. Government could even pay the premiums for poor folks. And if no insurance were available for routine medical care, the costs of routine medical care would, with the magical benefits of free market competition, fall to reasonable sustainable affordable levels once again.

We already have Medicaid and Medicare. Why make things worse?