Impeding changes to our Health Care system

[Urbane Guerrilla]

They're being subversive, or better obscurantist, about it the better to slip it by.

These are the people Redux is such a big fat fan of.

This is why sensible people stop voting Democrat, in some cases since sometime in the previous century.

Passage of a "healthcare" bill that is unwritten, and much more productive of dependency upon the public sector, the State, than it ever will be of healthcare or even medical coverage, will make it imperative that I never vote for a Democrat for any office in any place for the rest of my days. It just offends my Libertarian principles -- government should never be confused with a service industry, for it cannot function well that way. The Democrats do not understand this, while the Libertarians do. The Republicans -- they're a bit more amenable to libertarian logic, and the conservatives particularly so. Incidentally, none of the, um, plans will cover any more people than are actually chronically not covered now, somewhere between ten and twenty-five millions rather than the forty-seven million figure bandied about by the vehemently Statist, [capitalization intended] and they have openly said as much. Wow, such achievement! The 10M-25M estimate is made fuzzy primarily because of the "illegal aliens not covered" estimates. They are not precisely known, only quite imprecisely -- lack of data.

The health insurance market is at present unhelpfully regulated. By law, insurance companies are kept confined to given states, which measure is monopolistic. It takes only partial economic literacy to be aware of how unfortunate monopolies are for the economy that must contain them. Better not to. Lose the monopolistic -- government-created and government-imposed -- measures, and watch the efficiencies of the free market go right to work. Deregulation worked just fine for the airline industry once their lobbyists stopped whining. (Yeah, I know about the rags where there should have been screw caps. Doing well for twenty years doesn't absolutely guarantee you'll do well the twenty-first -- but which way would you bet? And how fast do problems that come to public light get corrected?)

There is no such thing, sayeth the Libertarian Party, as a natural monopoly. The case they make for their argument is pretty robust. It would, I think, be enlightening to take a look at it. Why, for instance, did people so often grouse about their cable service? The law, not the inherent nature of the telecommunications industry, tried to hedge cities about with only a single cable provider. Were the results any good from a content or service point of view?

There is the matter of tort reform, specifically limiting damages recovery from astronomical stakes to something less like hitting the lottery on Super Ultra Mega Powerball. This is intended to reduce exorbitant medical malpractice rates, which allows doctors to prosper once again, which indirectly benefits their patients, as doctors can either reduce fees, or confine them to covering, well, more rational cost figures. Medicine is not immune to Adam Smith. Stop making it attractive to the lottery-players, both within and without of the U.S. legal profession.