You are invited to read this extra commentary from the Free Enterprise Foundation. It will make you think!

Any Adults Out There?

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” Attributed to Otto Von Bismarck

Hope burns eternal. I keep hoping that as a nation we can sensibly deal with national governance on a thoughtful and rational basis. What are the needs we seek to satisfy? What are its costs? What are its consequences? Can we afford the costs, the consequences? If we were to proceed in this manner, we would evaluate all the information we had about the need and its causes and engineer an effective response that adversely affected our existing liberties as little as possible. Whoops! I had you there for a bit, but there you have it, that pesky word ‘liberties.”

In truth there is a portion of the electorate that thinks it is smarter and morally superior to the rest of us. It is determined to lead us to a collectivist solution that shackles our liberties and steals our property to provide the nation with their dream. Surely, we must see that they are right? How could we not embrace this golden future of brotherhood and equality? If we don’t there is something wrong with us, and we need to be shamed, isolated and if necessary punished for not getting it!

What those of us in the “cheap seats” need to understand is that more than the shape of health care delivery services is at stake. This is a serious battle to uphold personal responsibility, personal liberty and a viable free enterprise system. The outcries this summer will be forgotten with fall’s first cool winds. The desperation our collectivists feel to accomplish a long sought goal of universal, single payer health care will cause them to pay any price, do any deed that will be justified in the accomplishment of their long sought goal.

Be sure of this as well. This is not governed by Marquis of Queensbury rules. Anything goes! Anything! The goal is to be sanctified above all else and will readily sacrifice respect for our traditions of liberty and Constitutional rectitude to achieve its goals. Graf Von Bismarck also said that “Politics is the art of the possible.” Well, liberals have never been closer to achieving this goal, and they will not permit anything to stand in their way. They know that another opportunity is unlikely anytime in the foreseeable future.

Democrats have all but abandoned trying to work with Republicans to achieve a goal that is admittedly counter to all the Republican Party should stand for. Instead Democrats will wrestle with the more conservative members of their own caucus to fashion a solution that skirts Senate procedural rules and proffers whatever it takes in other legislative areas to bring along enough Democrats to deliver the grail of universal care.

From my perspective this is decidedly bad news. Our economy is ailing more from too much interference with the free market system by big government than irresponsible actions by out of control capitalists. In a truly free market, they would have been picked off before assembling enough power that their irresponsibility could hurt the rest of us. Even in a properly balanced mixed system, the existing regulatory brakes would have been applied well before the cataclysm that has occurred. Assuring that balance going forward first is far more important than sacrificing economic progress on the altar of universal care.

I fear that the shock to the system by adopting a politicized universal care system will be more than our economy can take and will be the proverbial straw that breaks its back. We all wish to feel importance in what we do, and the advisory committees that all the proposals use, and the requirements that the private care system follow the lead of the public in its coverage will inevitably create rationed care. It will destroy the viability of the private system. The goal of the Democrats is not to provide universal care at the level we have it today but to eliminate the Medicare unfunded mandates that loom just over the horizon. That cannot be done by this proffered method without rationed care or significantly increased taxes that would be required to pay for it at 50 percent of our GDP. It is a mathematic impossibility.

While raising thorny issues that will require compromise, there are alternatives that preserve our private insurance based system, and those efforts should be exhausted before even considering a federal role. Michael Moore and his ilk want you to believe that there are between 40 and 50 million uninsured. Let’s have you decide what the figure is. Of that figure, 10 million are not citizens, are here temporarily or illegally and shouldn’t be our responsibility; there are another 8.3 million who make between $50,000 to $74,999 and another 8.74million who make more than $75,000. There are also those who are eligible but for one reason or another have not claimed the help that is there. The closest we can come to agreement on a hard figure is that there are between 8.9 and 13 million Americans who cannot afford coverage. That may be a lot to cover but is a far cry from the figures used to panic the nation.

Wouldn’t it be better to talk about what it would take to cover this group with effective coverage and remove the onerous provisions from existing healthcare insurance that threaten us all, than rush to adopt a system that most assuredly will be poorly administered, provide inferior care and bankrupt the nation?

We all know what should be done. Insurance would be offered on a national as well as a statewide basis to provide the largest cohort of coverage and competition. Insurers would be required to take all comers without regard to preexisting conditions from the youngest to the oldest, the sickest to the healthiest, and insurers would use an inclusive, broad community standard for its rates. For the working poor and students newly on the job market, there would be refundable tax credits to cover on a sinking scale the cost of insurance until their income reached a threshold where they could fully carry it themselves, and the Constitutionality issue of requiring coverage would be complied with by tying grants and continued outstanding student loans to participation in the program. Taxation inconsistencies between self provided and employer provided coverage would be eliminated, and tort reform would mitigate the ultimate recovery for medical errors to a level more commensurate with actual cost to the claimant, and mandatory mediation and arbitration would be required by the parties to speed up the realization of the ultimate recovery. An approach such as this is possible and affordable, but it will require “adult supervision” to get it done. Any adults out there?

Copyright © 2009 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.