Robin Cox – 8/19/09

This page was last updated on August 26, 2009.

Let’s put the free market to work; Robin Cox; Beaver County Times; August 19, 2009.

My last letter on this topic was “Let liberty be basis of health-care bill.” Please read my paper entitled “Healthcare.”

Below is a copy of the letter as I submitted it.

Title: Restore healthcare free market

Underlying all the healthcare and healthcare insurance hyperbole, heart-tugging stories, and mostly irrelevant statistics is price.

An unintended side effect of a series of mostly well-intentioned government policies and programs (special tax treatment for employer-based healthcare insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, PACE, SCHIP, et cetera) has been to sabotage the natural price control mechanisms of a free market. I see two major actions necessary to restore these price control mechanisms for healthcare.

First, we need to phase out government healthcare insurance programs (except for U.S. military veterans), with an emphasis on phase out. It would be wrong to pull the rug out from under people we made dependent on these programs. To be fair to the most people, it would likely take a few decades to phase out Medicare.

Second, eliminate special tax treatment for employer-based healthcare insurance. Employer-paid healthcare insurance premiums must be subject to the same taxes – income, Medicare, Socialist Security, et cetera – as other wages.

I believe this represents the best approach to providing the best combination of healthcare accessibility, choice, price, quality, timeliness of treatment, et cetera while preserving individual freedom.

For your entertainment and as a teaching exercise, below you’ll find the reader comments visible on the Times website at the time I published this critique. They’ll give you an idea of the quality and tenor of some of the comments I receive via e-mail regarding my website’s critiques. I generally don’t publish the contents of e-mail I receive from critics because the sender may consider the message private and I don’t want to embarrass the author.

Without getting into a blow-by-blow critique of all of the comments below, here’s a partial list of observations.

· All but a couple of the contributors hid behind screen handles. Why?

· The William G. Horter comment is simply a continuation of his erroneous position that we have a free market in the healthcare/healthcare insurance industry.

pabob wrote on Aug 20, 2009 9:33 AM:

" So, obviously there are a large group of the minority voters (those who oppose our majority elected President) who are voicing their disgust. Yelling, kicking, screaming does not make a convincing argument. So, when I see that the majority of the previous posts are from an obviously disgruntled minority voter, it makes me wonder how much more of this childishness one can display before the realization occurs that their postings are no longer receptive. "

craig wrote on Aug 19, 2009 8:37 PM:

" dlesco; I would ask where the hell have you lived??? Did you not notice the near collapse of the entire financial sector not to long ago? All in the name of less regulation (repeal of Glass-Steagall act). Sweden or France (which are both evil, evil socialist of course) are perfect examples governments that work well for all of their people.....not just the exorbitantly wealthy. Nobody's knocking people that work hard and earn well. But when you have no rules (which is what you tout as reform) lots of people cheat. Lots of those that cheat (tax loopholes, off shore tax havens or DENYING LEGITIMATE HEALTH CLAIMS FOR MORE PROFIT) happen to already be extremely wealthy. That's where the outrage at the "rich people or fat cats" comes from. Not at honest hard working people.

OH and your prior posts seem a lot like gibberish. "

dlesco wrote on Aug 19, 2009 3:43 PM:

" The tired old cries against "free-markets" and "profit- generation" is really starting to get very silly, just where in the hell have some of you lived, that you believe that a "central government",a "socialist government" can do better than "the people"? I mean, you either have never "produced" on your own, or have ever had to live by "personal responsibility" in any form,or, and I truly hope this is not the case, but you must just be unwilling to do anything more than bitch and moan, because "you" are a failure, therefore it has got to be someone else fault,there is no possible way that "you" did it .

It has got to be the fault of that evil no good greedy "rich" guy, you know him. the one that pays the vast majority of the taxes "you" live off of, that disgusting "fat cat" that "provides the capital and employment that "contributes" to "you" having the best quality of life, than anybody else on the damn planet

" These arguments are becoming more and more irrelevant every single day, and the proof "(my loyal subject) is THE REJECTION of them every place you look "

dlesco wrote on Aug 19, 2009 2:13 PM:

" .....Isolated man can easily decide whether to extend his hunting or his cultivation.The processes of production he has to take into account are relatively small. The expenditure they demand and the product they afford can easily be perceived as a whole.

But to choose whether we shall use a waterfall to produce electricity or extend coal mining and better utilize the energy contained in the coal ,or to provide universal social services such as health care id quite another matter.

Here the processes of production or the implementation of social services, are so many and so broad,the conditions necessary to the success of the undertaking so multitudinous, that we can never be content with vague ideas, To decide if an undertaking is sound we must calculate carefully. "

dlesco wrote on Aug 19, 2009 2:02 PM:

" Great letter Robin...

H.R.3200 and all the other proposals are "by-design" massively complicated and uninterpretable, neither political party is being honest, in fact both are being criminally negligent in the enforcement of the constitution, and we as a Representative republic should demand accountability.

As a rule, anyone in possession of his senses is able at once to evaluate goods and services which are ready for consumption.Under very simple conditions,he should also have little difficulty in forming a judgment upon the relative significance to him of the factors of production or implementation of services.

When,however, conditions are at all complicated and the connection between things are harder to detect, we have to make more delicate computations if we are to evaluate.

" is it any wonder these so-called "health care " bills are so massive?" "

W Horter wrote on Aug 19, 2009 1:53 PM:

" Mr Cox, there is nothing to prevent private companies, if they are as efficient as you claim, from capturing this market. The problem is, the exact opposite has occured, rates are simply the highest on this planet. Rates double every few years under the private system, it has failed.

The mark of insanity would be to do even more of what isn't working! "

dlesco wrote on Aug 19, 2009 1:17 PM:

" The end result of this government take-over of another large chunk of the U.S. economy, will be the end of ,employer-based health coverage,the end of private-for-profit coverage and government "mandated" coverage ,payed for on the backs of "producers" and wage "earners"

It is basic economics,if you can not compete you go out of business, unless you are the Govt. with unlimited revenue, immune from regulation,and able to fix prices, and limit cost by limiting services.

it has nothing to do with political opinion it has to with basic economic principals and common-sense,and an "intellectual ability" to distinguish between your political view and reality. "

JDG wrote on Aug 19, 2009 8:37 AM:

" Those are logical ways to reform Health Care. However, reforming Health Care is not the intention of those in Washington, both the R's and the D's.

They give lip-service to "REFORM" but the intention is only to gain more power over the people (read: voters.)

On a side note... how the H - E - double hockey stick is Health Care a Federal matter? "