by Art Lindsey III

President Obama declared Wednesday night on ABC News that without healthcare reform the federal government would go bankrupt.

“If we don’t pass it, here’s the guarantee: the people who are watching tonight, your premiums will go up, your employers are going to load up more costs on you. Potentially they’re going to drop your coverage, because they just can’t afford an increase of 25 percent, 30 percent in terms of the costs of providing health care to employees each and every year. “And the federal government will go bankrupt.”

Well, I’ve got news for the president and everybody else out there who hasn’t been paying attention:

The federal government is bankrupt. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have to keep mortgaging our future to China and amassing a debt which has ballooned to an amount in the double-digit trillions. When you couple that with the printing rampage we’ve been on, how is it that anybody can say we will run out of money when we obviously already have? The motto of our government seems to be “Spend all you want, we’ll make more”.

Frankly, this has become a rather tiresome ruse. The idea that government knows anything about making or keeping businesses competitive is laughable. There isn’t a business on the planet that can compete with the federal government when it comes to resources.

Notice that “resources” is the key. No one is talking about quality, here. Everyone knows that the government is an inefficient, bumbling mess, no matter who is in charge, and it clearly doesn’t have to turn a profit. That alone makes it an unstoppable juggernaut. Businesses must turn a profit to survive. If they don’t, they go away. (Well, they used to before all the bailout junk started, but you get the idea.) The government seemly operates above all concepts of economics and logic, so in reality, President Obama’s argument is nothing short of a joke.

This whole discussion is rife with myths. Yes, there is a lot of money tied up in the medical insurance industry. But the truth is that people always look at the wrong number. While the large, zero-laden numbers look good at the end of the day, they don’t really mean anything. The number that everybody seems to ignore when they decide to demonize a particular business is that of the profit margin.

Now, in case you don’t know, the profit margin or the medical insurance industry is about two percent. Knowing that, there is no way an unbiased observer of the situation could accuse the medical insurance industry of being anti-competitive. A two percent profit margin would just be barely keeping one’s head above water.

If the federal government was so into competition in business why doesn’t it do more to relieve the financial burdens on businesses, like slashing our inflated corporate tax, and/or eliminating the capital gains tax? Furthermore, in the case of health care, why can’t our health policies be made portable, and why Americans buy a policy in any state that they choose? This would drastically expand every company’s potential client pool, and because of that, logic dictates that prices will come down. This is a basic component of our market economy. However, it has become quite clear that our government has no interest in that.

Isn’t it interesting how the Obama administration constantly touts job creation, yet it is hell-bent on interfering with an industry which makes up about one-sixth of our economy? Health care insurance providers will be unable to compete with a bureaucratic monolith that can continually give itself a blank check with which to operate. The private companies will fail, which will put many people out of work. Wait a minute. What about all that ‘job creation’ that Obama is so good at? Perhaps the only ones that really count in his mind are handful of prison guard jobs that will be created when he moves the Gitmo detainees to Illinois. Who knows at this point?

Continuing on, when you put a lot of people out of work, a domino-effect begins. They have to file for unemployment, which is funded by taxpayers. However, that’s just a tiny part of it. The real damage begins when the reality of this program begins to take hold. Providing quality, universal healthcare for a nation of over 300 million people is a financial impossibility, especially when you factor in our government’s penchant for waste. The tax burden required to feed the beast will balloon out of control, and the end result will be that corporations and workers will be so badly shackled by the government that the drive to produce will be lost. If such a thing ever happens, its game over, people. Welcome to the collapse of the United States of America.

All of that aside, the true answer to this manufactured “crisis” is personal responsibility. The fact is that most of the uninsured could obtain a health insurance policy at a reasonable price if they wanted to. Quality policies are available at prices less than $100 a month, and can be shopped for and purchased online as we speak. While it is true that the American health industry could be streamlined, the government certainly has no clue how to do it. Furthermore, the true hindrance in the situation isn’t the providers. It’s the Americans who are too irresponsible to take care of themselves.

Until that changes, nothing good will happen.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under Economy, Gitmo, Health, Health Care, Human Weakness, Obama, Personal Responsibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.