Posted on 11/01/2013 1:06:53 PM PDT by Kaslin
You can't keep your insurance if you like it under Obamacare, because you're too ignorant to understand what's good for you.
That's the argument we've been hearing from a lot of folks on the left -- an argument that pivots from "common good" to soft authoritarianism. President Barack Obama is all in, as well, claiming that he was merely guilty of forcing Americans to pick a "Ferrari" health care plan over a "Ford" one. (Is it really "picking" if you're forced?)
This is necessary because health care is not a product as a toaster is a product. (It took me only a few seconds online to find 613 different types of toasters, ranging in price from more than $300 to $15. They weren't subsidized, and I even could carry them across state lines. If health care were like toasters, we'd all be in great shape.) And as they do with anything that features negative externalities, technocrats will tinker, nudge and, inevitably, push.
"America doesn't have a free-market health care system and hasn't for decades," Business Insider's Josh Barro wrote in a piece titled "If You Like Your Health Plan, You Probably Shouldn't Be Able To Keep It." "With taxpayer subsidies so embedded in everybody's plan purchasing decisions, taxpayers have a legitimate interest in ensuring that health plans serve the public interest, not just private interests."
"Legitimate" is a malleable adjective. Just think of all the other areas of American society that are subsidized by taxpayers. Agriculture, higher education, the auto industry, the banking industry, professional sports, marriage -- the possibilities are endless. Why is Washington allowing 20-year-old college students to work on business degrees when we need them to be engineers and factory workers? We subsidize, so why don't we decide?
CNN.com contributor Sally Kohn wrote a piece titled "A canceled health plan is a good thing." You're not getting what you want; you're getting what you need. Kohn -- unsheathing the "public good" justification that opponents of same-sex marriage regularly use -- failed to mention even once that the president explicitly assured Americans while campaigning for the Affordable Care Act that "if you like your plan, you can keep it." NBC News is reporting that the Obama administration knew that millions of Americans would probably lose their current health plans because of the implementation of the law, yet it went on lying.
It's almost as if some people believe lying is acceptable -- even preferable -- if the political outcomes are morally pleasing to them. Many Obamacare supporters, in fact, are beginning to sound as if they couldn't care less about process, the law, order, competence or anything that undermines the goal of putting your health care choices into more capable hands.
But even the more specific arguments do not stand up to scrutiny.
Admittedly, many people do stupid things that aren't good for them. And though I may not know exactly what I need, I probably know as much about what I need as Kohn or Obama -- or even the 51.1 percent of the electorate that voted for the president. The reason Kohn and many of the others believe that Americans should be thankful for a paternalistic administration that en masse pushed us into (supposedly) top-shelf plans is that they don't believe in markets or they don't understand how they work -- and in some cases, it's both.
Let me put it this way: There's this Chinese restaurant near my house. It's not the cleanest place, granted. And the folks who "work" there are, it seems, completely uninterested in my dining experience. The food is priced accordingly. But I love the dumplings. It's really all that matters to me. There's another Chinese place nearby. This one is newer. It has a friendly and attractive staff. It offers me clean silverware, and I walk on expensive contemporary tiles. All that classy stuff is nice, and it's also embedded into the price of my dumplings -- which are no better. I don't want to pay for the tiles. I just want the dumplings.
In health care and other things, we often pick plans that offer us something we value above other things. Americans don't need all their plans to look the same. Maybe some of them like the customer service; maybe some like the stability of staying with one company for many years. This is why having 600 toasters in an open market is preferable to having a handful of choices in a fabricated "market" exchange -- and why choice is better for us than coercion.
Simple as that.
What he said and did about keeping pre-existing plans is total bush league politics. Kind-of like you would expect from a Chicago politician.
Obamacare is about two things and always has been POWER & CONTROL. We didn’t need to force everyone into a vast expensive complex bureaucracy to help a few million people get healthcare. It just wasn’t necessary.
What if Obama was selling cell phones instead of healthcare insurance?
And he promised you that if you like your plan or phone number you could keep them.
Imagine people being forced to stay on the two year cell phone plan because it was a federal law.
Healthcare insurance and cell phones are matters best sorted out by the free market.
Because no one likes being forced into a two year cell phone deal the market will respond and change it spontaneously.
However, the federal government has absolutely no mechanism built within it to respond as quickly as a free market can, therefore its only response can be more regulation.
I’m 59. Not only have I never owned (or desired) a Ferrari, I’ve only had one new car, ever. My auto insurance has a $2500 deductible. Would they force me to buy insurance to cover routine maintenance? Apparently. So, if I chose to pay less for health insurance but get less coverage, isn’t that my choice? Apparently not. Formerly, when unemployed I had only catastrophic care health insurance. It’s now illegal. So I’m forced to go uninsured. Thank you Obama. (I hope we meet after death. As when God tells the Jihadist who’s getting his after-death ass kicked: “I didn’t say you’d meet 72 virgins. I said you’d meet 72 Virginians.”)
Baucus: "It is a shift, a leveling . . . ."
America's liberty and prosperity for over 200 years was based on another idea, for the earnings of hardworking citizens were protected from the coercive hand of government by a written Constitution which did not allow the Baucuses of the world such "taking" power. Hear Samuel Adams:
"Is it now high time for the people of this country to explicitly declare whether they will be free men or slaves. It is an important question which ought to be decided. It concerns more than anything in this life. The salvation of our souls is interested in this event. For wherever tyranny is established, immorality of every kind comes in like a torrent, it is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice.” - Samuel Adams
And:
“The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.” - Samuel Adams
But, that doesn't stop the "progressives," who believe that "unconstitutional" means nothing but an inconvenience this President can bypass by Executive Order and Pelosi/Reid late-night votes.
Obama cares about destruction of the Country’s fabric.
Good points. The main issue to me is that they are taking away people’s choices. Comrade Obama and his henchmen are taking the position that they know what is best for us. We are too stupid to know if we want a cheaper, catastrophic illness only policy, or one which costs more but has more comprehensive coverage of everything.
We are too stupid to pick a plan which excludes maternity care, if we have no need for same.
We are too stupid to pick a plan which fits into our household budget, but still covers if we need hospitalization .
Obamacare is a strong metaphor, in my opinion, for government control, centralized bureaucratic control, central planning, or government bureaucracy running any major program.
Obamacare should be a major issue in the 2014 and 2016 election cycles. The failures of Obamacare are now out in the open. Democrats passed this without a single Republican vote. Democrats forced through a 2000 page bill, with at least 10,000 pages of bureaucratic regulation, on their own. This needs to be a major part of Republican and conservative campaigns in the future. Let the liberals keep stepping in it, by telling us it was for our own good and all that.
In spite of recent election losses by the GOP, remember that Obama was re-elected with only 51% of the popular vote. There is a strong base of opposition out there in the country to this president and to liberalism in general.
“In spite of recent election losses by the GOP, remember that Obama was re-elected with only 51% of the popular vote. There is a strong base of opposition out there in the country to this president and to liberalism in general.”
The media will again attempt to give us a socialist Republican candidate. I’d like to see everybody polling in the teens and twenties drop out early. But, it won’t happen. Everyone will stay in until only the media’s Mitt Romney equivalent is left.
“We will keep this promise to the American people...” - 0bama
and that’s a whole other issue altogether, as to how the Republican Party ends up with moderate RINO type candidates, as opposed to strong conservatives, as the presidential nominee.
I think we should resign from the New Hampshire/Iowa/South Carolina/Nevada early primary and caucus merry go round.
Why does the GOP have to have certain early states act as qualifying rounds for a presidential nomination? There is no law which says that a political party has to choose its nominees based on someone else’s schedule. Yet people act as if the New Hampshire primary is engraved in stone. The GOP could pull out of New Hampshire if party leaders chose to do so. We don’t have to accept the primary/caucus schedule these states decide to set up.
This is trully Marxist stuff, make everyone more pain to lessen on a few.
Who gets to determine what constitutes the “public good”?
I know, it’s liberal elites because they are so much smarter than everyone else.
It’ tyranny.
Repairing the damage requires a vast overhaul of the entire federal regime. The people who built the totalitarian bureaucracy include so many “leaders” that it would be a second revolution to clean house.
Thanks Kaslin.
“In spite of recent election losses by the GOP, remember that Obama was re-elected with only 51% of the popular vote. There is a strong base of opposition out there in the country to this president and to liberalism in general.”
Something struck me about this sentence and I just realized what it was. It contains the word “moderate” to describe a RINO. That’s the press’ word for a Democrat running as a Republican. Moderate is code for Socialist Elitist Lite. I don’t think conservatives should ever compare a conservative candidate with a RINO and use the word “moderate” because that immediately casts the conservative as “not moderate” or “extremist.”
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