The True Impact Of Health Care Legislation
Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 10:44AM 
I found the following while doing some research and felt it worthy of a post on FL Pundit. It was written as a comment by a gentleman named Michael Smith to a health care piece penned at wmbriggs.com:
Forcing one man to pay another man’s doctor bills is no more justified than forcing one man to pick another man’s cotton.
The healthcare market in America is the most government-regulated, government-controlled, government-subsidized and socialized market in existence. Let‘s look at a few examples of what government has done:
There are, at present, over 140,000 pages of Medicare rules and regulations alone, and the average doctor that accepts Medicare patients spends an average of one day per week doing nothing but paperwork to comply with this mass of rules.
Hundreds of thousands of other pages of regulations — which are constantly being expanded — cover the production of virtually every conceivable medical device or product. These regulations inflate costs — and, even worse, they constitute a huge burden to new competitors entering the market and thus protect older, less efficient companies.
The FDA spends years reviewing drug submissions — AFTER the drug companies spend years testing them.
The fixed payment schedules for Medicare, Medicaid and S-CHIP destroy any possibility of price competition between hospitals and doctors — while those same programs destroy any motivation on the part of those receiving benefits to shop for the best value.
Federal laws require emergency rooms to treat all comers, regardless of their ability to pay. This invites millions to get treatment free of charge, with the costs passed on to those of us who can pay.
State laws force insurance companies to sell policies that include coverages you may not want or need while prohibiting you from buying insurance from out of state.
Government destroyed the free market for healthcare — it has crippled all the market mechanisms that normally drive innovation and lower costs — and the resulting mess, complete with constantly rising costs and deteriorating services, is now being cited as a reason to EXPAND government’s control through the creation of dozens of new bureaucracies and thousands of additional regulations. This is positively Orwellian in nature and is exactly the equivalent of advocating that gasoline be applied to put out a fire.
ACTUAL healthcare reform would reduce or eliminate government’s role and return us to a competitive free market. But in its present form, this alleged healthcare “reform” is nothing but an excuse to further mass-loot America’s most productive people to pay for unearned benefits for the rest, while granting government vast new powers over our lives.
Whether Americans will tolerate this attempted power-grab-larceny or stop it dead in its tracks remains to be seen. Our fate as even a quasi-free people hangs in the balance.
Reader Comments (3)
What a great summation. There is nothing good in this monstrosity unless you are trying to bankrupt a capitalist nation. Imagine if they could find a way to pass Cap & Trade as well. You'd have some higher income folks paying 80%+ of their income to the government.
Yeah, this sums it up perfectly. Unfortunately, it's not a pretty picture. Let's hope some in the Entitlement Class turn on these jokers, or we're in trouble over the long haul.
Lets not forget that any states that have tort reform laws will have to pay a penalty. I swear that this bill is really about pushing doctors down and making lawyers the most prestigious and lucrative profession in the land. This bill will literally make any of the best and the brightest not go into the medical profession, and the good ones get out.