The Reality Of Obamacare

by Jonah Goldberg - March 23rd, 2010 - Los Angeles Times

The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.

That's always what Obama had in mind. During the now-legendary healthcare summit, Obama, who loves to talk about "risk pools," "competition," "consumer choice" and the like, let it slip that he actually doesn't believe in insurance as commonly understood. The notion that Americans should buy the healthcare "equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car" seemed preposterous to him. "I'm buying that to protect me from some catastrophic situation," he explained. "Otherwise, I'm just paying out of pocket. I don't go to the doctor. I don't get preventive care. There are a whole bunch of things I just do without. But if I get hit by a truck, maybe I don't go bankrupt." Apparently, people are just too stupid to go to the doctor -- or maintain their homes -- if they have to pay much of anything out of pocket.

The endgame was to get the young and healthy to buy more expensive insurance than they need or want. "Expanding the risk pool" and "spreading out the risk" by mandating -- i.e., forcing -- young people to buy insurance is just market-based spin for socialist ends. A risk pool is an actuarial device where a lot of people pay a small sum to cover themselves against a "rainy day" problem that will affect only a few people. Such "peace of mind" health insurance is gone. What we have now is health assurance. With health assurance, there are no "risk pools" really, only payment plans.

The most important aspect is that what you pay will not be decided by you. It will be decided by big brother, the government goon who will be "protecting" you from a failure to get health care by forcing you to pay. Unless of course they consider the health care you need to be too expensive for the taxpayer to cover. At that point, what you paid will not matter. You will be denied health care by a different goon from the one who was "giving" it to you before.

It is most appropriate that the goon who will now decide what you pay is the IRS. That is right. $10 billion dollars will pay for a huge army of IRS agents, 17,000, to collect your health insurance payments. Think this is not a new tax? Even Obama thinks of it as a tax. The choice of who will collect it was made specifically with the known reality that it is mandatory and you will never be able to complain that you are refusing to pay because you are not getting good service. Collection is totally separate from providing the service. That is socialism. Welcome to the totally transformed America of Dictator Barack Obama. 17,000 new IRS agents and not a SINGLE NEW DOCTOR!

If you think this is a better system, you are an idiot. You are also a slave.