How the health care bill may save America
LD wrote (12/12)
I don’t really see the whole health care bill as such a disaster for the right. From what I understand they tried the same thing under much more ideal conditions in Massachusetts and it already broke down. They started out with universal healthcare but now immigrants are barred from the free health care plan. Note that I am not talking about illegal aliens but all immigrants. This is something I found very surprising, considering how leftist Massachusetts is. I think taking this plan nationwide won’t work at all even in the short term. And when I say that it won’t work, I don’t mean that the lines will be long and that the service will be bad. What I mean is that the bureaucracy simply won’t be able to provide the services at all. The blacks and Mexicans will lose out the most because unlike the whites they will have no alternatives.
LA replied:
Oh, I agree it won’t work. But that will then increase demand for the “only solution”: single payer.
That’s why I think that Dems’ don’t care how damaging the bill is.
LD replies (12/18):
I think you have it backwards. I think the worst case scenario is what has been going for a long time. The lawyers and the bureaucracy have been driving up healthcare prices for years and it’s being done so gradually that the public doesn’t know who is to blame. They’ve been working toward the time when the public is unhappy enough to fall for the single payer solution, but the opposition to the plan shows that the ideal time for the leftists to strike is still a few years away. Obama is making a mistake by jumping the gun and Conservatives should let him do it. If Obama takes ownership of the socialized healthcare and causes the whole system to crash it would be the best case scenario.
LA replies:
Let me restate what I think you’re saying and you tell me if I have it right.
1. You’re saying that what we have now—a system of multiple private third party payers (plus Medicare and Medicaid) in which prices keep going up—is already the worst scenario, because the constantly rising prices are leading to a demand for a single payer system.
2. Then you’re saying that the proposal to adopt Obamacare represents an improvement on that scenario because if Obamacare were adopted it would fall apart, thus breaking the momentum toward a single payer system.
However, if that’s what you’re saying, then my question for you is this: how would the collapse of Obamacare help in the long run, since it would simply return us to what we have now: a system of private third party payers with prices steadily rising, leading ultimately (once again) to the demand for a single payer system?
LD replies:
I don’t think a collapse of Obamacare will simply return us to what we have now. Obama and other Democrats would lose their reelection and it will turn Americans against government-run healthcare for at least a generation. It will also take down Medicare and Medicaid because the whole healthcare system in general would be jammed.
I can’t pretend to know what will happen beyond that because I don’t think it ever happened in America before. We can look at countries like Brazil or Italy where everybody views the government as corrupt, and cheating on taxes is socially acceptable. Unlike most Americans these days, the people of those countries have a healthy disrespect for government. The problem is that they forgot that there was ever an alternative to their way of life.
I am not saying that those countries are a good model for us. I just think that this country is heading for a crash one way or the other, and it’s better to derail this train while there are still conservatives around who remember how things used to be.
- end of initial entry -
A. Zarkov writes:
LD writes, “From what I understand they tried the same thing under much more ideal conditions in Massachusetts and it already broke down. They started out with universal healthcare but now immigrants are barred from the free health care plan. Note that I am not talking about illegal aliens but all immigrants.”
Massachusetts like all the other states of the union must balance its budget and can’t print money. To pay its bills it must tax or float bonds. Generally bonds go for capital projects not expenses, so it would have had to raise taxes for pay for immigrant medical care. On the other hand, the U.S. government can borrow like crazy even for expense items, and it can, and does print money. With a 100 percent fiat money system, through the Federal Reserve, the federal government has unlimited spending power. Moreover it can and does issue short term paper—T-Bills, which it constantly rolls over. Thus it has virtually unlimited borrowing power. This is how the feds came up with $ trillions for TARP and stimulus packages and bailouts for Fannie and Freddie. Most people have no idea just how large a trillion dollars is—it’s mere a word thrown about in news stories. Should all this ignite a hyper inflation, all the better for Obama. It would create an emergency and an excuse to grab more power.
The Massachusetts story fails to impress me.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 19, 2009 12:35 PM | Send