Wednesday, February 01, 2012 11:59 AM
Cyrus Shick Kimberly, do you know what it's like to be without health insurance?
Jennie
During my marriage and raising my children I didn't have health insurance. I would ask the doctors to reduce their fee and they were always very generous with us and would reduce the fee they never turned us away. I took control of the si...See More
Doug H McCormick
I have a better idea, a one page health care insurance bill:
A free market health insurance plan. Let's all pause here for a moment so progressives can Google the term "free market."
Nearly every problem with health care in this country – apart from trial lawyers and out-of-date magazines in doctors' waiting rooms – would be solved by this plan.
In the first sentence, Congress will amend the McCarran-Ferguson Act to allow interstate competition in health insurance.
We can't have a free market in health insurance until Congress eliminates the antitrust exemption protecting health insurance companies from competition. If progressives really wanted to punish insurance companies, which they manifestly do not, they'd make insurers compete.
The very next sentence of provides that the exclusive regulator of insurance companies will be the state where the company's home office is. Every insurance company in the country would incorporate in the state with the fewest government mandates, just as most corporations are based in Delaware today.
That's the only way to bypass idiotic state mandates, requiring all insurance plans offered in the state to cover, for example, the Zone Diet, sex-change operations and whatever it is that poor Heidi Montag has done to herself this week.
President Obama says we need national health care because Natoma Canfield of Ohio had to drop her insurance when she couldn't afford the $6,700 premiums, and now she's got cancer.
While Obama's use of terminally ill human beings as political props is disgusting, perhaps Natoma could have afforded insurance had she not been required by Ohio's state insurance mandates to purchase a plan that covers infertility treatments and unlimited ob/gyn visits, among other things.
It sounds like Natoma could have used a plan that covered only the basics – you know, things like cancer.
The third sentence would prohibit the federal government from regulating insurance companies, except for normal laws and regulations that apply to all companies.
Freed from onerous state and federal mandates turning insurance companies into public utilities, insurers would be allowed to offer a whole smörgåsbord of insurance plans, finally giving consumers a choice.
Instead of Harry Reid deciding whether your insurance plan covers Viagra, this decision would be made by you, the consumer. (I apologize for using the terms "Harry Reid" and "Viagra" in the same sentence. I promise that won't happen again.)
Instead of insurance companies jumping to the tune of politicians bought by health-care lobbyists, they would jump to tune of hundreds of millions of Americans buying health insurance on the free market.
Hypochondriac progressives could still buy the aromatherapy plan, and normal people would be able to buy plans that only cover things such as major illness, accidents and disease. (Again – things like Natoma Canfield's cancer.)
This would, in effect, transform medical insurance into a form of actual insurance!
This bill would solve nearly every problem allegedly addressed by Obamacare – and entails zero cost to the taxpayer. Indeed, a free market in health insurance would produce major tax savings as layers of government bureaucrats, unnecessary to medical service in America, get fired.
For example, in a free market, the government wouldn't need to prohibit insurance companies from excluding "pre-existing conditions."
Of course, an insurance company has to be able to refuse new customers with "pre-existing conditions." Otherwise, everyone would just wait to get sick to buy insurance. It's the same reason you can't buy fire insurance on a house that's already on fire.
That isn't an "insurance company"; it's what's known as a "Christian charity."
What progressives are insinuating when they denounce exclusions of "pre-existing conditions" is an insurance company using the "pre-existing condition" ruse to deny coverage to a current policy holder – someone who's been paying into the plan, year after year.
Any insurance company operating in the free market that pulled that trick wouldn't stay in business long.
If hotels were as heavily regulated as health insurance is, right now I'd be explaining to you why the government doesn't need to mandate that hotels offer rooms with beds. If they didn't, they'd go out of business.
I'm sure people who lived in the old Soviet Union thought it was crazy to leave groceries to the free market. ("But what if they don't stock the food we want?")
The market is certainly a more powerful enforcement mechanism than indolent government bureaucrats. If you don't believe that, ask Toyota about six months from now.
Right now, insurance companies are protected by government regulations from having to honor their contracts. Violating contracts isn't so easy when competitors are lurking, ready to steal your customers.
In addition to saving taxpayer money and providing better health insurance, this plan also saves trees by being 2,199 pages shorter than the progressives' plan.
So the plan does give progressives a little bone.
Feel free to steal this, Patriots! Reformed progressives may steal it too!
John Cheeseman
Cyrus, you have obviously not taken the time nor shown any interest in learning the truth so why do you continue to deny it. You speak above that Obama has done nothing concerning abortion, bro. you don't have a clue, your blind and how man...See More
about an hour ago · Like
John Cheeseman All the miseries and evils men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war proceed from their neglecting or despising the precepts contained in the Bible-Noah Webster.
Jennie I'm stealing it for C4F Doug H McCormick. lol
Cyrus I am away from a computer at this time and using a phone instead, so I promise to respond to all of this in long form shortly.
However, John - you people do realize that abortion is not Planned Parenthood's primary goal, do you not? Have you ever been to a PP clinic?
JennieThis video from people who were in the abortion industry and making a ton of money will refute this claim, that, the main purpose of PP is not abortion. http://bloodmoneyfilm.com/
Please view it.
Bloodmoney, The Business of Abortion | A Documentary Film
bloodmoneyfilm.com
Learn the stark truth about the abortion industry right from the lips of former clinic owners and post abortive women.