David A. Catania is embracing the feel-good movement that thinks anyone living within America’s borders is somehow entitled to “accessible and affordable health insurance,” depending, of course, on one’s definition of accessible and affordable.
Whenever a lawmaker is inclined to employ the code words “accessible and affordable,” taxpayers are obligated to clutch their purses and wallets with conviction and recall P.J. O’Rourke’s pithy observation on the health care debate.
“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free,” he said.
Mr. Catania, an independent at-large member of the D.C. Council, is endeavoring to provide an estimated 25,000 uninsured residents with a subsidized health plan. The city would contribute about $21 million to the plan by dipping into the tax-increase well, starting with doubling the cigarette tax to $2 a pack.
Under Mr. Catania’s proposal, residents would pay monthly premiums between $20 and $100, based on the gross income of each person. Mr. Catania suggests the plan is a fiscal winner because the uninsured are accustomed to exploiting a system that turns away no one. This results in the costs being passed along to those consumers who have the capacity to pay higher premiums. The cost of treating the uninsured far exceeds the cost of implementing a subsidized plan, by Mr. Catania’s calculations.
The plan, if approved by the D.C. Council, would take effect in July 2009. Residents would have until January 2010 to enroll in the program or face a $250 fine if they elect not to have insurance.
This is the logical course of the Nanny State. You are a young adult, in the prime of your life, and decide not to have health insurance because of the statistical probability that you will not need health coverage until later in life. The decision seems reasonable enough. It is not unlike what insurance carriers do, charging premiums based on a person’s age, lifestyle and medical history.
In the Nanny State, however, this conscious decision is removed from the individual and placed in the hands of so-called “professionals,” who purport to know better than you what is best for you.
This bears no relation to yesteryear’s America, composed as it was of a citizenry that accepted the validity of their choices, good or bad, and the consequences, good or bad, that ensued.
More and more Americans today seem ever willing to turn their welfare over to a cold, inefficient, anonymous bureaucracy whose record in other areas of public life is hardly stellar. Waste, graft and corruption are recurring conditions of government bureaucracies, because they are institutions stuffed with imperfect, flawed humans.
The private sector is generally more efficient than bureaucracies because of the profit/margin line. Waste is more readily eliminated in the private sector because of its drain on profits. Inefficiency is more readily eliminated as well because of competition. If your company is unable to perform a service in a forthright manner, you can be certain a competitor will be obligated to fill the void.
Alas, our present health care system is neither in the government nor private domain. It is a laborious system that needs to be abolished no doubt, removed from employers and dropped into the marketplace. For now, it functions in a kind of capitalistic/socialist purgatory.
Health care could do well to borrow the system of automobile-insurance providers. It should see that a sniffle resulting in a $20 co-pay fee is silly, absurd. Imagine trying to have an automobile repaired in the co-pay system instead of the marketplace.
Health insurance should be limited to chronic conditions or catastrophic events. It should not be the much-abused system that it is today, a hypochondriac’s co-pay dream.
Yet our lawmakers are not entertaining these kinds of questions. They merely want more of your money to fashion remedies that one day will require even more money and legislation to fix that which does not work.
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