Blogs For Victory

This should make you liberals think, if you’re at all capable of it:

A strong force, perhaps as powerful in Congress as President Barack Obama, is keeping the drive for health care going even as lawmakers seem hopelessly at odds.

Lobbyists.

The drug industry, the American Medical Association, hospital groups and the insurance lobby are all saying Congress must make major changes this year. Television ads paid for by drug companies and insurers continued to emphasize the benefits of a health care overhaul—not the groups’ objections to some of the proposals.

“My gut is telling me that something major can pass because all the people who could kill it are still at the table,” said Ken Thorpe, chairman of health policy at Emory University in Atlanta. “Everybody has issues with bits and pieces of it, but all these groups want to get something done this year.” As a senior official at the Health and Human Services department in the 1990s, Thorpe was deeply involved in the Clinton administration’s failed effort.

Now, does anyone out there think that all or part of the lobbying effort is altruistically designed to ensure that Joe and Jane Average obtain good health care at a reasonable cost? If you do think this, then I’ve a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

There are just so many things wrong with the very concept of health insurance that it’d be days just listing them. But, among the many terrible things is the fact that the people who provide insurance – whether private or government – are not in it for the people who use the insurance. Private insurers are, of course, in it for a profit – and nothing particularly wrong with making a profit, but it should make everyone wary of what the insurance companies say is a good idea…it might be a good idea, but it must be cast against the fact that it might merely be a good idea for the insurance companies.

Our liberals answer to this, of course, is the magic wand of government – just put bureaucrats in charge of it, take away the profit motive and, hey presto!, everything’s peachy. I’ll pause while all non-liberals get themselves up off the floor due to their fits of laughter at that concept…

The problem with government insurance is that the government is in it for the government – meaning that the bureaucrats who run the system are primarily interested in having the least amount of work and the highest amount of pay possible. This is because government isn’t a for-profit enterprise…a bureaucrat doesn’t get a bonus for making a citizen happy. In fact, citizens are the bureaucrats’ natural enemy…we take up their time and cause nothing but trouble. Try and help a citizen out and you might make a mistake and then you’re in trouble, so what good did that do? The fewer citizens a bureaucrat has to deal with, the better (for those of you who don’t believe this, I present you as evidence your local DMV).

The problem is that we are stuck with insurance. Liberals created Medicare in the 1960’s to just take care of Granny so that no one had to bother their little heads about her. Trouble is, by providing coverage for every little thing, Granny started to exhaustively use the system, pushing up prices which impelled the rapid spread of private insurance, which drove up costs even further, which priced un-insured people out of the market…etc, etc, etc. But probably 99% of Americans (or, heck, I might actually be the only person who has figured this out, as no one I’ve ever talked to has noted this before I did) don’t understand that the problem with health insurance is the fact that it exists. If we had catastrophic and chronic medical insurance, that would be another story – like having car insurance to fix the $5,000.00 while everyone ponies up for their own oil changes, etc. But to tinker with the concept of insurance is a losing proposition right now – people are so used to insurance that there isn’t the ability to break in and offer the alternative. We have to some how or another fix what we’ve got in a manner which doesn’t bankrupt the country.

I’m working on such a plan, but I haven’t got it ready, yet; and I don’t want to present the half-formed to criticism. But one thing I know for certain, asking lobbyists for health care (of whatever stripe) is not the thing to do. We’re on the verge of disaster if we go the route we’re going – double disaster if the lobbyists are as involved as this linked article indicates. And as for you liberals – weren’t you once upon a time horrified at the very concept of lobbyists? Where is your outrage, now?