Obama is a Socialist
Posted By Alan Partis on October 31, 2008
One of the popular solutions often put forth on how to ‘fix’ health care in the US is this one:
> Well, if you’re required to have car insurance, why not health insurance?
Sure, why not. That’s what they’re doing in Massachussetts now. However, in a free society, the government has no business telling me that I MUST purchase the services of any given business or enterprise (including auto insurance, by the way). Are they also going to tell me how much I have to spend on that insurance? Or from whom I must purchase it? What if I don’t have a need for insurance, nor desire for it? At the point when government is demanding that I spend that money, it looks to me more like a tax.
All I expect of the government is to help hold people accountable for their actions i.e. if you cause a car accident, then you should pay for the damage you cause. It’s really quite simple. If you’re incapable of being responsible for your own actions, then you should either remove yourself from society, avoid the actions for which you cannot be responsible, or purchase insurance to help pay for the damages your actions may cause. The simple enforcement of accountability would go a very long way toward improving a great many ills in our society.
So why stop at insurance? If you’re going to mandate that everyone must go out and purchase health insurance, why not also mandate that they go out and buy food? Seems to me if everyone was required to go out and buy food that there would be no more hungry people. Isn’t that easy? We can solve the hunger problem simply by mandating that people buy food!
Surely you see the fallacy of government mandates such as this to be actual solutions to problems. Government mandates don’t solve problems — they only reduce liberty.
The problem with health care is that it’s expensive. Mandating that everyone purchase health insurance won’t make health care less expensive. It won’t impact the cost of health care services at all. Still, as medical costs continue to rise (since that problem still won’t have been solved — as if there IS a solution to it), insurance premiums will have to rise and very soon people won’t be able to afford the insurance they’re being told to purchase. So then, government will feel compelled to step in again and mandate lower premiums or more taxpayer-funded subsidies i.e. take more money from successful folks and shift it to less successful ones (AKA wealth redistribution all over again). Or, they might tell people like me that my deductible is too high (my deductible is currently $10,000) and that I must get a more expensive plan so that I can pay higher premiums into the system.
Mandating health insurance is not a solution … it’s more problem. If this is Obama’s solution, then he’s very much the socialist of which he is accused.
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