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In selling the “Affordable” Care Act, the left trotted out its usual panoply of utopian promises — if Americans would surrender their decision-making freedom to bureaucrats holed up in some Washington D.C. cubicle. The result? “Care” that is anything but affordable.
The moral argument against government paternalism is that it legalizes plunder, or as French statesman Frederic Bastiat called it, “philanthropic tyranny.” If the average Joe tried to take your hard-earned cash by force, he’d land in jail. Yet when the government does it? It’s called “social justice.”
The practical effects of government meddling are just as disastrous, though, and the Obamacare train wreck is a prime example, with Americans continuing to pay a steep price for the “solutions” to problems politicians created in the first place.
Gen Zers might not remember the marathon debates around Barack Obama’s signature law, the “Affordable Care Act.” Prior to its passage in 2010, the left was adamant that Obamacare would do two magical things:
1) No one would lose their existing health insurance. Obama himself infamously quipped, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
2) Premiums would drop by $2,500 for American households; “affordability” was a key selling point.
Basically, the left trotted out its usual panoply of utopian promises — if only you’d surrender your decision-making freedom to bureaucrats holed up in some Washington D.C. cubicle.
Would you believe me if I told you that the exact opposite happened — that insurance premiums soared and that existing healthcare plans were wiped out?
According to the Heritage Foundation, before Obamacare the typical monthly premium for those who bought insurance on the “individual marketplace” (aka, not through their employer) was around $244 per person.
Not bad, no?
The left, however, labeled these low-cost plans as “junk” because they didn’t deal with every imaginable incident. The deductibles were higher too, but that was the trade-off — more affordable monthly premiums in exchange for less comprehensive coverage.
Progressives loathe the kind of trade-offs that offer Americans a variety of choices independent of state control.
Remember, the only time leftists are inspired by the word freedom is if it involves unlimited abortion access or busty drag queens cavorting with toddlers.
In the end, Obamacare erased low-cost options, replacing them with a laundry list of mandates that insurers were forced to provide. This included stuff like pregnancy (even if you’re a single dude), mental health, and other services you may never use. The left called these dictates “essential health benefits,” although they were hardly essential to the people paying for them but only to the political class that declared them so de novo.
The result was that millions of plans were axed, and healthcare premiums shot up for everyone. For example, by 2019, the average premium nationally jumped to a whopping $558 per month per person — a 129 percent surge since 2013.
A Forbes analysis revealed that four years after the law’s passage, individuals were hit with a $2,524 annual hike, while families saw their costs explode by $12,040.
Look, I’m not a math whiz, but when you promise savings of $2,500 and premiums are up by more than double that… something’s off.
In a rational world, our leaders would own up to their mistakes and resign for their incompetence.
Apologies aren’t on their establishment’s radar. No, they think the problem is we don’t have enough regulations, subsidies, and mandates. And they’ll keep singing that tune until we’re all stuck with a British-style nationalized healthcare system, even if it was government interference that distorted the landscape of medical care in the first place.
Here’s a history lesson you won’t hear from a Bernie Bro, courtesy of the late Milton Friedman, the renowned economist out of the University of Chicago.
As World War II unfolded, the federal government made the brilliant (read: foolish) decision to levy wage and price controls, which, shocker, led to shortages — including a labor shortage. To attract workers under these unfavorable conditions, companies began pitching medical insurance as an additional form of compensation. This idea quickly caught on, and now the setup is baked into most employment agreements.
Despite its appeal, this “fringe benefit” brought along two major drawbacks.
First, health insurance doesn’t have “portability,” meaning you can’t take it with you when changing jobs. It is tied to your employer, skewing how Americans view work opportunities. That’s especially relevant in today’s workforce, where people are more mobile and no longer stay with the same employer until retirement. Insurance providers tried offering competitive pricing to individual buyers as an alternative, but that hasn’t gone so well (see above).
Second, treating healthcare as a “fringe benefit” has completely warped how we handle that category compared to other necessities like food, housing, or clothing. When you buy groceries, no “third party” is involved, noted Friedman. You pay for the items yourself. The same is also true for gas, clothes, and virtually everything else. But healthcare? Most payments are funneled through your employer, the government, an insurance carrier, or some combination of the three.
Such an arrangement is fundamentally flawed because, as Friedman memorably put it, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own.” Instead of insurance indemnifying against catastrophic events and “large losses,” it’s been stretched to encompass “regularly recurring expenses.”
This shift twists the core objective of an insurance product.
Quoth Friedman:
“We insure our houses against loss from fire, not the cost of cutting the lawn. We insure our cars against liability or major damage, not the cost of gasoline. Yet in medicine, it’s become routine to rely on insurance for regular checkups and even prescriptions.”
Our entire system, therefore, is designed to disconnect consumers from the real cost of their care, which kills any incentive for price discipline or market competition. And that was before progressives poured gasoline on the fire with Obamacare’s mandate palooza, further worsening the problem.
Is it any surprise rates have skyrocketed?
Of course, the left’s remedy to the debacle they caused is to crank up their favorite Oprahism: “You get a handout! You get a handout! Everybody gets a handout!”
What never crosses their minds is abandoning their obsession with central planning and returning the law to its original purpose: defending the life, liberty, and property of the American citizen.
We cannot afford government “help” much longer.
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