..........Washington DC is no place to run health care services for the nation. Thus the Framers left public health decentralized. But if there were any doubt, the history of Medicare and Medicaid is the proof. Real cost control has become a national nightmare. Fraud has proliferated despite every effort to stop it. Program costs are always underestimated. In 1966 the cost of Medicare to the taxpayers was about $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost taxpayers only about $12 billion by 1990 (adjusted for inflation). The actual cost? Nearly nine times as high - $107 billion. By 2006 Medicare reached $401 billion while Medicaid added another $309 billion for a total of $710 billion.
The health care programs Democratic leaders are pushing are outrageously expensive and fiscally irresponsible. The federal Health Care takeover will subsume about one-sixth of our national economy. Combined with current federal, state, and local spending, government will control about 50 percent of total national production. At this point the goal of centralized administration will be in sight, with less than half of our once free economy to be brought under government control.
........There are essentially three models for health care delivery available to us. First, today's broken model in which bureaucratized insurance companies monopolize the field in each state - this is the "business-government partnership" model, the "crony capitalism" that corrupts our economy. Second, the Progressives' model where centrally administered government takes over the field and government bureaucrats decide which services you are allowed to have. Third, the only true American model in my view, a free market in which health care services compete, and individuals - the consumer-patients and their doctors - are in control.
Bureaucratized health care is not and cannot be "compassionate" health care. Government agents don't make decisions about how to treat the sick according to personalized need ... they ration health care resources according to a dollar-driven social calculus. This isn't a flaw in their plan. It is their plan.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the Obama Administration's point man on health care issues, advocates what he calls a "whole life system," a comprehensive formula for health care rationing. Under this system, government makes treatment decisions for individual persons using a statistical formula based on average life expectancy and "social usefulness." In other words, socially "useful" patients deserve more care than "useless" persons. Consider the legislation's new Medicare board of unelected specialists whose job is to determine the program's treatment protocols as a method of limiting costs. We already have a new comparative effectiveness research bureaucracy whose sole mission is make government determinations about which health procedures it deems are most cost effective and will be allowed by health care bureaucrats. The whole purpose of this heartless calculus is to eliminate compassionate personal care by loved ones under free markets with a diversity of health resources at proportional costs.
.......But the struggle over federal health care reform, the Democratic leaders' signature program, goes beyond the problem of national health. This debate encapsulates the defining issue of our generation: should we reform and strengthen America's free market democracy, or should we abandon it for a European-style social welfare state, the dream of third wave Progressives? Ultimately this is about an ideological crusade.
.......The US is already perilously close to this "tipping point." While exact and precise measures cannot be made, the Budget Committee minority staff have developed the warning indicators. In 2004, by our measure, 20% of US households were getting about 75% of their income from the federal government and have already become government dependents. Another 20 percent were receiving almost 40 percent of their income from federal programs, and are certainly already reliant on government for their livelihood.
All in all, about 60% of US households were receiving more government benefits and services (in dollar value) than they were paying back in taxes. We estimate that President Obama's first budget alone raises this "net government inflow" from 60% to 70%.
.....American citizens once took pride in being responsible for their individual well-being and for governing themselves in freedom. They are now to become passive subjects of government leaders, wheedling for hand-outs, more concerned about their security than their liberty. Isn't it wiser to suppose that those who promote this program are smart enough to know what they are doing? When we reach their intended goal, those who still cherish human freedom will be reduced to near-silence. Whatever you call the post-American regime they would impose on this land, it will be no democracy.
......In the current economic crisis there has been no lack of greed, envy, ambition, and plain ignorance in corporate boardrooms, financial markets, and government hallways. The capital sins are always with us. But the foundations for this crisis were laid by Progressivism itself, above all by encouraging "crony capitalism." The Democratic leadership is trying to cure the diseases of "crony capitalism" with more "crony capitalism." What we really need is a new engagement with the principles Progressives repudiate, the principles that founded this land of freedom.
This nation was based on the self-evident truth that unalienable rights were granted to human beings not by government but by "nature and nature's God." The truths of the American founding cannot become "obsolete" because they are not temporal. They are eternal. "The laws of Nature and of Nature's God" are the sure touchstones of right and wrong for individuals and societies, for all time. They are the most inclusive ideas ever embodied in a government. If all human beings have equal natural rights, that is final. "All" means "all."
......President Obama famously said that he wants to "spread the wealth around." Democratic Party leaders hanker for those Old World notions of rule by the patronage of bureaucrats and judges. The chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank recently said as much: Democrats "are trying on every front to increase the role of government." I appreciate his candor but I can't help hearing an echo of George III excusing "taxation without representation." We swore off rule by the "better classes" a long time ago.
These leaders underestimate the American people. They have broken faith with independents, Republicans, and their own rank-and-file. They have walked away from the foundational truths that made America the wonder and envy of the world. And the price of their infidelity will be high.
No comments:
Post a Comment