Scientists are frantic.
They’re working diligently to find a curable salve for Americans who have “felt the Bern”, but the problem is getting worse. Appearing Sunday, March 26 on the circus that CNN calls “State of the Union”, he made what many free market economists have known was going to be the next move in a decades-long plan to push the US healthcare system away from competition and efficiency and into the hands of government. He announced his intention to make the ultimate, or at least penultimate, push to get the overly-regulated system completely under political control. He said he is going to introduce a single-payer health care bill in the US Senate.
Claiming that the stillborn Ryan revisions to the technically fascist Obamacare law were bad from the outset and deserved to be defeated, the faux “man of the people” (who, thus far, has not opened his new lakefront estate to teams of Vermont hippies) made the spurious and deceptive claim that if the revisions had gone through they would have thrown “24 million people off of health insurance”.
Beyond the fact that he can’t claim with any surety that 24 million people would lose their health insurance, the problem with his statement is that many of those people don’t want what they are being forced to buy, and many of the folks who run the insurance companies would prefer to offer them a wider range of policies, but they are forced by government mandates to include coverage for all kinds of expensive services and medicine – and bureaucracy – that the politicians dictate.
And lest one be mistaken, the Ryan plan would not have changed this very much. Essentially, it was “Oryancare”, a RINO-styled echo of the insulting Obama law that left most of its most unctuous commands entact.
Given the Orwellian title, “Affordable Care Act”, the Obama scheme was, and still is, an unconstitutional law filled with mandates that are neither “affordable” nor “care”. Just the fact that it mandates actions by businesses and consumers ought to be enough to turn people away. And the fact that it is a stepping-stone to the final plan of the centralizers, a “single payer system”, should have set off more than a few alarm bells.
Government run medicine is something that leftists have worked towards for longer than many Americans have been alive, and Obamacare has been one of the final moves in this long chess game. Just like its progenitors on the state level, “Obamacare” was designed to increase policy costs via political mandates for “Guaranteed Issue”, which is the command that insurance companies cover people with preexisting conditions.
The push for “Guaranteed Issue” mandates throughout the 90s was designed to inspire young people to avoid getting “insurance” until after they become ill, and it worked. As has been shown in state after state where “Guaranteed Issue” was tried, people in their twenties are generally healthier than older folks, and they opt to pay other bills than get health insurance they might not need. This causes an upward price spiral in the system, whereby younger people who make fewer claims are no longer buying insurance, no longer paying “clean” money in premiums. As a result, the pool of insured people becomes relatively “sicker” and increases costs for the insurance companies. The companies respond by having to raise rates, and, again, people on the younger margin (say, in their thirties) decide to drop coverage and get it after they get ill. This, in turn, leaves an even higher concentration of ill people in the insurance pool, driving claims up, and -- what a shock -- insurance companies have to raise their rates again.
Essentially, “Guaranteed Issue” turns health insurance into government-mandated health care coverage at rates that would normally be higher for higher-risk people. It is like mandating to a property insurance company that it cover people who have a home on fire, or who have a record of having burned down previous homes. You can get your policy after the fire starts, so why bother getting it prior to the first flame?
And the mandate in the Obamacare law and its state-level predecessors in not an “error” on the part of its designers. As many free market economists have noted since at least the mid 1990s when DC leftists at the DNC and Clinton Administration handed Democrat state politicians what was essentially the same bill to instigate “Guaranteed Issue”, this was part of a plan to fuel higher prices and discontent.
Jonathan Gruber, the reviled co-architect of the Obamacare plan, has admitted as much: the mandate is there to push up insurance rates and generate anger towards health insurance companies, giving the leftists space to do precisely what Senator Sanders wants to introduce.
As noted by Tyler Durden of Zerohedge, Gruber has openly stated that Obamacare is working precisely as planned. It is increasing costs for the average health insurance consumer and it is decreasing choices, which is why the feds had to mandate that people buy policies. As Gruber noted years ago:
If you had a law that made it explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people are going to get subsidies, it would not have passed.
Yeah, and if people had some more respect for the supposed rules of the U.S. Constitution, the law would not have passed, either, Mr. Gruber.
Which brings us to Sanders’ new move on the grand chessboard. Sanders knew from the start that Obamacare would not work to drive down costs or give people better choices – only competitive free markets have the incentives to do that. The plan has been to make insurance unaffordable for more and more Americans, and drive them off their private policy, into the hands of Mr. Sanders... And if that sounds creepy to you, you aren’t alone.
Sanders wants to introduce a DC run health plan for “all” akin to the wonderfully efficient Medicare and Medicaid, and decrease the eligibility for Medicare from 65 years of age to 55. As Nicholas Loffredo writes for “NewsWeek”, Sanders told CNN:
Let us do, among other things, a public option. Let us give people in every state in this country a public option from which they can choose. Let's talk about lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 55. Let's deal with the greed of the pharmaceutical industry.
Neither constitutional nor historically shown to have been conducive to bettering health care or lowering costs, Mr. Sanders’ plan fits right in with the collectivist agenda, and it’s something one can tell he has been salivating to introduce. The Ryan team has left the door wide open for it and what would come after, and the only force that might stand against this in the long run, even if Sanders doesn’t win this year, is the American public. The only way they can combat this is to recognize what has created the problem of increasing health insurance and health care costs, and that can be summed up in one word:
Government.