Obama's Health Care Plan

The various health care plans being debated at the moment are full of crap, of course. Even those who are in favor of passage of this or that bill understand that they come at the price of pork to get votes. To some extent this is unavoidable if you want a bill to pass.

But the aspects of these bills that gets my attention is the costs and the penalties for non-compliance - you know, the fascism. Every major health care plan that Obama or the congress has so far debated calls for things that would increase the costs of insurance. The requirement that insurance companies cover pre-existing condition is the biggest reason to expect price increases. How could they possibly take on the obligation to cover any condition you already have without raising the cost of their premiums?

This is not a small matter. As it is, for my wife and I to get health insurance we currently would have to pay at least $6,000 annually. That is with a very high deductible, which means that the odds are good that we would never get a single penny of benefits. Under the plans being debated, that cost would likely go to $9,000 or $10,000 per year - again with almost no chance that we will get any benefit for that expenditure. Our usual thousand-dollar year will be far under the deductible, so unless we have a major accident, we are likely to spend $100,000 in the coming decade without any benefit.

I use the word fascism because a fascist system is one in which the government allows private enterprise, but controls it - to the detriment of some companies and the favor of others. In this case, every bill has prison time as the penalty for us not feeding the profits of insurance companies with our $9,000 or $10,000 contribution. That is about as extreme a form of fascism as I have seen in a while in this country. We will be told to enrich large corporations or go to prison if any of these proposals become law.

I will save arguments against government-run health care for another time. I won't even get into the stupidity of the particular plans and how it could be done better at a lower cost. My primary point today is that it is just plain evil to take away a man's freedom and lock him up in a prison cell because he refuses to provide the profits insurance companies will make under these health care plans.