This week the Senate Republican leadership unveiled its Obamacare replacement plan. Like its House counterpart, the misnamed Senate plan retains most of Obamacare’s core features.
Both the House and Senate plans allow states to obtain waivers providing relief from some Obamacare mandates, although the waivers in both bills are too restrictive to be of much value. For example, the Senate’s bill does not allow states to have waived two of Obamacare’s most destructive mandates — guaranteed issue and community ratings.
The healthcare debate is dominated by emotional rhetoric about how government-run healthcare is necessary to protect the vulnerable. For example, in May, Jimmy Kimmel Live host Jimmy Kimmel delivered a touching monologue about his newborn son’s open-heart surgery. Mr. Kimmel ended his monologue with a plea to retain Obamacare so all children can obtain life-saving treatment. After the monologue became a national sensation, many suggested that any Obamacare replacement plan be judged by a “Jimmy Kimmel test.”
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Every decent human being supports a healthcare system that ensures children have access to medical care. However, this does not mean every decent person should support government-run healthcare. In fact decent people should oppose all forms of nationalized medicine.
Government intervention in healthcare distorts the marketplace with mandates, subsidies, and price controls. As is the case with any goods or services, price controls in healthcare result in shortages and even price increases as providers look for ways to offset their losses caused by the controls. This is why many Americans have seen their health insurance premiums skyrocket under Obamacare.
Government-run healthcare can be deadly. Anyone who doubts this should consider the case of Laura Hillier, an 18 year-old Canadian who passed away from leukemia while on a government medical treatment wait list. This is one of many horror stories from Canada, and other countries with nationalized healthcare, of individuals who died while waiting for their turn to receive medical treatment.
One need not look to Canada to find casualties of government intervention in healthcare. In 2013 Sarah Murnaghan, a ten-year-old cystic fibrosis patient, almost died because of federal rules forbidding children her age from receiving organ transplants. Public outcry eventually forced the government to allow Sarah to receive the transplant, but how many Sarahs have died because of government organ transplant rules?
The Jimmy Kimmel test is a valid way to evaluate healthcare proposals. However, there should also be a Laura Hillier or Sarah Murnaghan test forbidding adoption of a new healthcare system that increases healthcare costs, creates healthcare shortages, or allows government to deny anyone access to healthcare.
The free market meets all these tests. In a free market, doctors voluntarily donate their time to help those in need, while private charities and churches fund charity hospitals and clinics. Such a system flourished in the days before Medicaid and Medicare, and would quickly return if the welfare state is eliminated.
Congress should be working to repeal all federal interference in healthcare, including by shutting down the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA raises the cost of medicine, denies Americans access to effective treatments, and prevents individuals from learning about cost-effective ways to improve their health.
Unfortunately, a Congress that so quickly abandons its promise to repeal and replace Obamacare will not restore free-market healthcare — or otherwise reduce the welfare-warfare state — unless forced to do so by an economic crisis or demands from a critical mass of pro-liberty Americans.
They’re not going to do it because free stuff is popular and people/voters on average are willfully blind to the consequences of overspending by government or just don’t give a sh!! as long as they get what they want.
The AMA et al will lose too much power and money if the Healthcare System was opened to free market . The Government likewise needs another tread on their stairway to complete control of its peasants .
Canadian healthcare, like all socialized medicine, is about eugenic disposal of inconvenient seniors, not a healthy society.
I waited five years for a triple bypass that I needed right away. The waiting period is their cost control.
Or , you could have eaten the Dean Ornish vegan lowfat diet. It was your choice
This bill does nothing to reduce health care costs. It does nothing to improve the functioning of health insurance markets – in fact, it will send them into death spirals by reducing subsidies and eliminating the individual mandate. There is nothing at all in the bill that will make health care more affordable for those currently having trouble paying for it.
There is no ‘good solution’. Tear jerking stories are inevitable and do ‘children’ really deserve priority over adults? Transplants are a stop gap measure. They don’t last forever and require an expensive drug cocktail to protect the transplanted organ that leaves the recipient vulnerable to other disease. If you are going to die in a month without one and can afford to pay for it ( and can find an organ ) go ahead but a transplant is not a god given right nor is it a ‘cure’.
“Unfortunately, a Congress that so quickly abandons its promise to repeal and replace Obamacare will not restore free-market healthcare”
‘Scuse me, but a Congress that promises to repeal and replace something that their presidential candidate promised to simply repeal is full of shit, too. That’s what has always bothered me about you, Dr. Paul. You almost say what needs to be said; almost but not quite.
their presidential candidate promised to simply repeal
Somebody’s full of shit, but it ain’t Dr. Paul:
“It’s gotta go,” Trump said of ObamaCare in an interview Wednesday with CNN. “Repeal and replace with something terrific.”
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/29/politics/donald-trump-immigration-plan-healthcare-flip-flop/index.html