History Shows Us the Truth About Obama’s Healthcare Plan

Obama’s healthcare plan is the biggest most sweeping government program since social security. The President has been out trying to win over support for this program. He has been telling us how essential it is to our economy and making many promises as to what it will do for us. Obama has made five promises for his healthcare plan:
1. Participation is voluntary
2. It will cost less
3. It Will cover everybody
4. You can keep your current doctor
5. It will not add to the deficit

All this may sound well and good but these are merely promises. Obama has often been compared to FDR so let’s see what history can teach us about FDR’s big new program. When Franklin Roosevelt introduced his proposal for a new program, Social Security, he promised five things:
1. Participation would be completely voluntary
2. Participants would only pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their income.
3. The money that participants elected to contribute would be tax deductible
4. The money put into the social security program would only be used to pay social security benefits. The money would not be used to pay for any other government programs
5. Social security benefit payments would not be taxable income.

I don’t need to tell you as you all ready know not a single promise was kept and the future solvency of the Social Security program is very much in doubt. Oh you say this time it is different the Democrats are in charge and they would never let anything happen to our healthcare plan. Every one of the social security promises were broken by the Democrats. Oh but how can this be I thought the Republicans were the ones taking away social security? And there you see the real reason Obama and his party are pushing so hard for the healthcare plan. It will create an even larger dependent class that they can lie to and scare them into keeping them in power.

Health Insurance

I think the issue with health insurance is that it is not really insurance or at least it is not used as insurance. What health “insurance” has evolved into is pre-paid medical. Insurance is supposed to be used for the unexpected, the unforeseen incident that we can do little to protect ourselves from. Fire insurance in case our home burns down. We have theft insurance in case we are burglarized. We buy auto insurance in case of an accident. If we treated auto insurance as we treat health insurance it would pay for our gas, oil changes and even routine repairs. I believe that many of the problems we have today with our health care system can be solved if we went back to a true insurance model. Use our health insurance only for major medical expenses. We should pay for our regular doctor visits, minor illnesses and yes even prescriptions out of our own pockets. But wait you say you cannot afford that! I think that we cannot afford not to. The only way to bring down the cost of health services while maintaining quality is to have the people using the services pay for the services directly. Let’s say that a routine doctor visit cost $350. I have no idea how much it actually costs and I would bet that most you don’t either. Many of us would rightly say that we cannot afford to go to the doctor and we would no longer go. This is where the miracle happens; doctors’ not wanting to go out of business find away to reduce the $350 office visit to $150 or want ever it takes to get patients back in the door. Medical costs are high because they can be. If the government takes over the payment of medical expenses from insurance companies we have not fixed the problem only masked the symptom. Artificial price controls will only lead to shortages and lower quality. This has been true ever time price controls have been used in every industry I have no reason to believe that this time will be the exception