Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (33 page)

The Democrats calculated that, once their unpopular bill had become law, public opposition would subside, as voters finally “found out what was in it.” But it hasn’t played out that way. One of the reasons is the hundreds of “waivers for favors” bestowed after the fact on the administration’s friends and supporters. True to Gammon’s Law, this massive new regulatory scheme has “customers” attempting to escape the bureaucratic “black hole” like rats fleeing a sinking ship. HHS documents show that the administration has been granting waivers from the law’s more onerous requirements hand over fist—especially to its friends. A total of 1,625 groups representing 3,914,356 individuals are now exempt from some of Obamacare’s more onerous mandates.
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Recipients include large corporations, health insurance companies, and even whole states. By far the biggest beneficiaries? Labor unions, representing 543,812 workers.
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Welcome to the government system, where who’s in and who’s out and what care you get and don’t get is based on your political “graft and pull” in the system. Lost in translation: patients, and
their
intentions and choices.

YOU WILL PAY

O
NE OF THE MANY TRAGEDIES OF
O
BAMACARE IS THE SO-CALLED “INDIVIDUAL
mandate” to buy a government-defined benefits package that you may not want, may not need, or cannot afford. No matter. You will buy it, or you will pay dearly. Polls show this mandate to be the single most unpopular aspect of the entire scheme: two-thirds of Americans oppose it, and 72 percent think it’s unconstitutional.
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But this will never stop its supporters from clinging to it, to the bitter end. By their own repeated admissions, the mandate is the law’s linchpin. Without it, their whole scheme unravels.

The mandate, in its essence, asserts a power on the part of the federal government to regulate you
simply because you live and breathe
. Think about the implications of such government powers over your individual freedoms.

So where exactly does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to tell us to buy health insurance? The law’s defenders point to the power to regulate interstate commerce . . . or wait, is it the General Welfare Clause? . . . the taxing power? . . . well, um, it’s probably in the Fourteenth Amendment somewhere. Hmm. Okay, they’re not really sure by
what
authority they’ve mandated it, but they just
know
it’s constitutional. In February 2012, Congresswoman Kathy Hochul, Democrat from the 26th district of New York, committed a classic gaffe—let the truth slip out—when she admitted to an astonished group of her constituents: “Well, basically, we’re not looking to the Constitution on that aspect of it.”
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Arguably the most victimized constituency under Obamacare—and there are many potential victims—is the Millennial Generation, young people who showed up in droves to vote for Obama. They worked for hope and change, but what they got was the short end of a typical collusion between health insurance interests and the Obama administration that forces younger, healthier, poorer people to subsidize the health care consumption of older, sicker, wealthier folks. Young people, already saddled with record joblessness and unprecedented debt from student loans, will be forced into the system to prop up a financial house of cards. But hey, at least they’ll now get a free ride on their parents’ insurance policy until they’re twenty-six.

Know who deserves a waiver? All 310 million of us.

GOVERNMENT FAILURE, MARKET SUCCESS

A
DVOCATES OF CENTRALIZED MEDICINE ARGUE THAT MARKETS HAVE
failed to meet people’s needs, and (because, they’re always telling us, health care is
different
) government must step in to do it. But this argument never holds up. Every alleged instance of market failure turns out, upon examination, to be an example of government failure. Whether it’s railroads, energy production, or health insurance, the culprit behind the flaws in the system will invariably be a misguided government regulation or benefit scheme that impedes competition and keeps consumers from making the right choices.

The price-signaling system works to allocate resources to those who need and want them. Where the price system appears not to be working, look closer: you’ll find the government behind the curtain, pulling levers and pushing buttons, trying to displace the personal knowledge of millions and millions of Americans regarding the best decisions for their families.

In top-down systems run by third parties who don’t know you and will never care about you, patients get lost, subjugated to someone else’s purposes.

HEALTHY COMPETITION

S
URE ENOUGH, THERE IS AT LEAST ONE AREA IN HEALTH CARE TODAY
where we
can
see patient freedom working effectively: cosmetic surgery. That’s because insurance companies don’t typically cover it; it’s a “self-pay” market. So third parties like insurers, employers, and governments aren’t meddling in the doctor-patient relationship. The result? Continuously falling prices and continuously rising quality. Exactly what we’d expect in freely operating markets where the patient (the customer) controls the dollars.

One of the best examples is laser eye surgery, more commonly called LASIK. At the time of its approval in the 1990s, it cost upwards of $2,000 per eye.
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Today you can get it done for $1,800 per eye, on average,
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and as low as $500 in some cases, with success rates approaching 100 percent. Faster lasers, larger spot areas, bladeless flap incisions, intraoperative pachymetry, and “wavefront-guided” techniques have significantly improved the speed, reliability, and comfort of the procedure for patients. That record of increasing value compares extremely favorably with other areas of health care that are typically covered by insurance. In areas dominated by third-party payment, it’s not the value that goes steadily up, year after year, but the cost.

The paternalist types will protest: well, maybe economic freedom works for
optional
services like cosmetic surgery, but surely we can’t trust people to be in the driver’s seat for their own care when it comes to
serious
ailments like cancer and heart disease! Actually, we can. It’s true most of us have never been to medical school. But when it comes to making health care decisions for ourselves, there’s no reason why we can’t make prudent choices with the help of our doctors, without interference by third parties.

When you walk into a typical modern grocery store, what do you see? An incredible, almost bewildering array of products. How did that remarkable cornucopia come into existence? Who decided how much shelf space to devote to tomato soup, as opposed to candy bars? Why does one brand get more space than another? Why are some products not offered at all?
Who planned all this?

The answer, of course, is no one planned it. The miracle of the grocery store is generated out of the trillions of small decisions made by millions of individual shoppers every day. These choices are constantly shaping and refining what you find when you walk into Safeway or Wal-Mart. We aren’t all farmers or chefs, and most people don’t even pay that much attention to what groceries they buy. But driving up the quality of choices doesn’t require everyone to be an expert, nor does it take every single shopper scrutinizing every product carefully. Even if just a small handful of smart shoppers make careful discriminations between products, favoring those of highest value and eschewing those of lower value, the effect is sufficient to be transformative. These informed consumers’ choices signal to the grocer: stock more of this, less of that; provide more shelf space for this, less for that. It’s awesome. Especially for us lazy shoppers, who get to glide along in the wake of our neighbors who are more aggressive discriminators of price, quantity, and quality.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

W
HAT’S TRUE OF GROCERY STORES CAN ALSO BE TRUE OF HEALTH
care. In fact, as it happens, one great example of health care innovation based on putting patients first can be found at Whole Foods Market. The chain’s cofounder and CEO John Mackey has empowered “team members” at Whole Foods to voluntarily choose high-deductible insurance plans coupled with Health Savings Accounts. The result has been better choices at lower costs. According to Mackey,

The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.

Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
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John Mackey is an interesting cultural mash-up, best understood by imagining what might have happened if Ayn Rand and Jerry Garcia had procreated. Mackey would surely be their love child—half organic-food-obsessed, crunchy vegan hippie; half Declaration of Independence–reading, freedom-loving rugged individualist. On the one hand, Mackey is an advocate of what he calls Conscious Capitalism, through which he means to debunk the caricature of the revenue-maximizing-at-any-cost businessman. He believes that “every business has the potential for a higher purpose. And if you think about it, all the other professions in our society are motivated by purpose, beyond a narrow interpretation of purpose as restricted to maximizing profits.”

Mackey notes that “doctors are some of the highest paid people in our society and yet doctors have a purpose—to heal people—and that’s the professional ethics taught in medical school.”
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On the other hand, Mackey has become famous for saying things that could never pass Barack Obama’s lips: “America became the wealthiest country because for most of our history we have followed the basic principles of economic freedom: property rights, freedom to trade internationally, minimal governmental regulation of business, sound money, relatively low taxes, the rule of law, entrepreneurship, freedom to fail, and voluntary exchange.”
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Some progressives don’t quite get it. Describing Whole Foods’ founding grocer,
The New Yorker
observed, “The right-wing hippie is a rare bird.”
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Capitalists who care about their fellow man?
Crazy!
They react to Mackey in much the same way Al Sharpton does to
black conservatives.
What exactly is the Left afraid of—a little diversity?

That certainly explains the far Left’s unchecked aggression against what Mackey wrote against Obamacare in a
Wall Street Journal
op-ed in 2009.

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment.
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His critique of Obamacare was followed by an eight-point health care reform plan based on the company’s own experience. First, he recommended, government should “[r]emove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).” Daring to take this real-world experimental data to its logical conclusion, he went on to recommend other, even bolder ideas, such as equalizing the tax treatment of health insurance, regardless of whether you get it from your workplace or the yellow pages; increasing competition among insurers; repealing costly, unnecessary mandated benefits on insurance policies; tort reform; Medicare reform; and greater price transparency for consumers.

But what really got Mackey sideways with some was his willingness to address the wholly contrived point of faith among progressive Democrats that health care services are a government-granted right:

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.
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Unforgivable!
The greengrocer’s apostasy against the Chosen One’s plan to take over our health care system was greeted by an organized boycott of Whole Foods. That boycott was in turn offset by a Tea Party counterprotest—a “buy-cott.”

PAGING DR. PAUL

E
VERYONE KNOWS
R
ON
P
AUL IS AN OUTSPOKEN LIBERTARIAN, BUT
many aren’t aware that the Texas congressman is also a physician who has helped deliver 4,000 babies. Dr. Paul shares Mackey’s rejection of “health care as a right.” He also points out the silliness of the idea that a lack of government-promised care means that people should or would go without. At a Republican presidential candidates’ debate in 2011, Paul shared what would become a notorious exchange with moderator Wolf Blitzer of CNN. Blitzer asked a hypothetical question about a thirty-year-old man caught without health insurance when calamity hits, and he goes into a coma. “Who pays for that?”