Reframing the Health Care Debate

An Open Letter to the President, Congressman Nye, Senator Webb, and Senator Warner

Nancy Pelosi has recently indicated she may be willing to substitute a "trigger" in the healthcare legislation in place of a binding requirement for a "public option." Her "thinking," if you want to call it that, is to give insurance companies time to drive costs down or else the public option will be implemented. The fallacy of this argument is that the "trigger" levels can never be met by insurance companies, without a concomitant elimination of layers of regulation and artificial Medicare fee schedules, set by government and to which private insurance rates are tied. In fact, I believe her strategy is to ADD regulation and price controls, which would in effect "trigger" the public option.

Let this citizen be clear. Reframing this debate by using "words that work" phraseology or substituting new concepts of "triggers" and "co-ops" for the concept of a public option will not work and do not change the underlying facts of the debate. I do not want out of control government managing another one-sixth of the economy through social engineering. Congress would be better off spending its time figuring out how to pay for the debt it has incurred and scaling back the programs that are driving that debt: inefficient, corrupt, and in most cases, ineffective government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and VA run healthcare (among many others).

My freedom is more important to me than my health, which I seem to be managing just fine on my own because I OWN IT. It is unfortunate that I was not given the option to own and manage my own "social security" (viz., a private option to Social Security, an ironic concept, don't you think). If I had been given that option, I would have three times the amount of money I expect to receive from Social Security, under present forecasts. Unfortunately, the government did not invest that money, they traded it for IOUs to China and spent it on programs like the National Endowment of the Arts, which the administration is now trying to co-opt into producing art, music, and slogans, to market its policies. Why should I believe that "public" health care should turn out differently?

In closing, I recommend that you obtain a copy of Thomas Sowell's book, Basic Economics, AND READ IT. Apparently, either Congress does not understand basic free-market economics or they choose to ignore it in an attempt to "remake" America in the image of European socialism.