How We Could Have Solved The Real Healthcare Crisis

One of the economic subjects we have not discussed at great length is healthcare. Or rather national healthcare as passed by Congress in March. Over 2000 pages of regulations were passed that, in many cases, have absolutely nothing to do with healthcare, and everything to with concentrating financial power in the hands of the few, at the expense of the many.

For years, national healthcare was sold as a solution to provide insurance for the estimated 40-50 million Americans who did not have health insurance or could not afford it. Many people have suffered without healthcare. Many people have been financially devastated because they could not afford to keep their health insurance after losing a job, especially when an individual, private health insurance plan, can cost as much, or more, than a typical monthly mortgage.

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Solving the advertised health insurance crisis would have been a very doable task. Currently there are a number of high risk insurance plans in various states throughout the country. In Wisconsin, for example, is the HIRSP plan, the health insurance risk sharing plan, which has been existence since the late 1970s. The plan provides basic, low cost insurance coverage, including prescription drug coverage, to individuals and families who cannot obtain coverage through normal commercial channels. Is it perfect, no. Does it work, yes. I know several people who utilize the plan and have had very good success with it. Plans like this could have easily served as pilot programs to create larger regional plans, or even a national plan, to provide needed health insurance coverage to uninsured Americans. A plan that would have solved the advertised problem of helping those 40-50 million uninsured people.

In many ways, that's what many people were led to believe what national healthcare would be all about. What emerged as law from Congress this March was an encyclopedia of rules and regulations, whose sole purpose was to concentrate power, under the guise of "solving" the advertised problem, of providing healthcare to those 40-50 million uninsured Americans. Neither your congressman nor your senators ever read the bill, yet many of them put their signature upon it. In fact, even now, virtually no one has read the bill in its entirety. Its rules and regulations will be revealed as news items, in the weeks and months ahead, as reporters comb over the bill, and parcel out pieces of already passed legislation as revelations and news items. It's as if congress is asleep at the wheel, and nobody's minding the store. To borrow a line from NASA: Houston, we have a problem. And that problem is the inefficiency and dinosaur-like status that comes from the centralization of 1/6th of our economy under the umbrella of national healthcare.

You see, as America consolidates its central planning efforts, The New York Times reports in an article this week, that Britain is planning to decentralize its healthcare system. The aim is to shift control of England's $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy, to doctors at a local level. You see, in England, the pendulum has already swung too far into the unproductive clutches of bureaucratic centralization.

The irony is, that as England begins to make major course corrections away from central planning, the U.S. appears determined to move full steam ahead into an economic nightmare of its own making.