So there you have it, folks. Of 18 highlighted points, most or all of them will increase payments made by government or increase health insurance premiums. This is “bending the cost curve”.
Not Yours to Give - U.S. Rep. (TN) David Crockett
The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other.
The Parable of the Satellite Dish - Doctor Zero
Interestingly, a commenter criticized the parable because "you cannot equate entertainment with health care services", but that is entirely beside the point. The purpose of the parable is not to prove that health care and entertainment are equivalent. One certainly is much more important than the other. Rather the point is that if free citizens have the right to make free decisions about a relatively unimportant issue, like entertainment, then they certainly should have that right for more important matters, like health care. And furthermore, under the Constitution the government has no right to take that freedom away.Here are some lessons to ponder from the Parable of the Satellite Dish:
Never accept permanent solutions that are nearly impossible to change, when simpler and more easily modified plans are available. It’s foolish to let the advocates of permanent programs dismiss flexible alternatives before they have been tried.
A proposal that requires you to ignore both the past and the future is a swindle, not a solution.
Free people do not accept restrictions from which their government is exempt. This is one of the differences between leaders and rulers.
A demand for commitment without a guarantee of performance is domination, not service.
When free people are told something is “inevitable,” their response should be an immediate and overwhelming refusal to accept it. Inevitability is a self-fulfilling prophecy in the absence of resistance. Freedom is the never-ending quest for alternatives.
The people who loudly celebrate “diversity” keep coming up with universal plans. Their State is a giant who trims citizens to fit its bed, using rusty implements. The giant, the bed, and the implements were all equal sins in the eyes of our Founders. They come as a set.
When the State refuses to let you debate the terms of its plans individually, you can rest assured the whole is worse than the sum of its parts.
Freedom requires the courage to avoid being stampeded. You should ask more questions about something you are told is an “essential right.” Sober reflection is a hallmark of maturity. A wise State would not require its citizens to act like children.
The State cannot give you anything worth having. You’ll eventually find yourself guilty of the crime of wanting more. As the State fails to live up to its promises, it will be increasingly tempted to convict you of that crime… in advance.
Hospital wards to shut in secret NHS cuts - Jon Swaine and Holly Watt
Last year all English health authorities were ordered by Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, to reconsider their plans after the recession forced the Government to freeze health spending from April next year.
This left a ''black hole’’ of up to £20 billion in health budgets up to 2014, prompting the drawing up of new proposals by the 10 strategic health authorities (SHAs).
They had until Friday to submit their plans to Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary. He is under pressure from the Treasury to show how money will be saved to help bring down Britain’s record £167 billion deficit.
O-Care - A Good Government Advocate's Nightmare - cleangovernmentnow.org
The essence of O-Care is quite simple: Health insurance is now an arm of the federal government by virtue of extensive federal regulation of the terms, conditions and comparative rates health insurers can offer. The law tells insurers how to run their business and then offers to pick up the cost where conditions prove uneconomic. Hmmmm. If this all sounds a little dodgy, your instincts are correct. We tried this kind of experiment in housing with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were pressed to buy non-economic sub-prime loan dressed up to look respectable via bundling and shaky insurance.
This secondary market "nudge" by the government was a major reason for the bubble and subsequent collapse of the financial system under the weight of $2T of bogus AAA securities. Expect similar results from health insurers who will look a lot like the housing Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) going forward. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started with a modest mission of helping first time home buyers and morphed into near monopolies in the residential home market.
It gets even worse with O-Care. Housing is real property with an underlying intrinsic value. Medical expenses are consumer expenditures. Extensive regulation will mean only a few "too big to fail" mega-insurers are likely to survive. With fewer competitors, the prices go only one direction: UP. Americans will not put up with rationing, and they have come to expect the best care in the world, so any pretense of cost controls is just that: pretense. O-Care only expands the cancerous dynamics of the third party payer and creates more of a sense of entitlement to be paid for by the ever diminishing "other guy".
Non-Enforcement: A Feature Or A Bug? - John Hinderaker
Quite simply, Obamacare has created a ticking time bomb for the insurance industry. Those with preëxisting conditions will be covered.....and demand continuation of the coverage at prescribed rates....and those who ignore the mandate, presumably anybody at all affected by it, face no consequences. As costs spiral out of control, premiums will have to rise and subsidies increase. Insurance companies would have to either fold or shift costs....to those covered by employers....becoming a perfect target for left wing demagoguery and vilification. The only way out as more and more of those covered by employers get pushed into the exchanges as costs get shifted to them and employers no longer offer insurance -- yet another intended consequence -- is the public "option" or outright nationalization through a single payer plan.
