Dear Jared (Polis), Mark (Udall), and Michael (Bennett):
In response to a previous missive of mine, I received a franked, printed letter from Mark Udall, Colorado Senator, dated September 16, 2009. In it Mark listed five requirements that would have to be satisfied before he would vote for health care legislation:
1. Allow people who like the coverage they have to keep it.
2. Bring costs down so that all Coloradans are able to cover their families while staying within their means.
3. Preserve the critical doctor-patient relationship, ensuring that decisions about treatment are made by those who know the patient best.
4. Call for insurers to provide coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions or medical history.
5. Be fiscally responsible.
Jared and Michael, I invite you to listen in on my response to Mark's requirements, since you all will have some effect on the final shape of health services in these formerly free united States. Here's my take on the five:
1. Merely allowing people to keep their current coverage if they like it isn't enough. Any bill that surreptitiously undermines the economic structure of insurance by providing an expensively subsidized "public option" (actually, let's call it by its right name: Government Mandate) will eventually destroy the private insurance business, since private organizations will be unable to compete with the anti-competitively subsidized government "option."
2. A far better way to truly bring costs down is to reopen a free market in medical services by first desanctioning all organizations like the AMA, ADA, etc., and allowing these organizations to evaluate their practitioners privately, without the force and violence of government looming behind their membership requirements. In other words: abolish the phrase "illegal practice of medicine." I hesitate to mention the corollary "illegal practice of law" and its accompanying phrase "malpractice reform."
3. The best way to restore the doctor-patient relationship is to relink its economic lifeline by either removing the unfair and economically devastating tax deduction that only corporations get for providing health insurance for their employees, OR level the playing field by making all healthcare costs fully tax-deductible by individuals. If the health reform bill that you vote for does not address this long-entrenched unfairness, it will do nothing to improve the doctor-patient relationship, and will likely destroy it instead, by interposing government bureaucracies between the patient and doctor.
4. The completely nonsensical and ruinous call for insurers to cover all pre-existing conditions and ignore medical history will lead to people buying insurance only when faced by medical expenses they can't handle on their own. This flies in the very face of the bald meaning of the word "insurance." Are you trying to redefine the English language? Please drop this pandering to those whose foresight lacks the basic common sense to prepare themselves for situations they can't imagine might happen in their future. And it is pandering, pure and simple. Stop it.
5. It isn't possible for a taxpayer-financed government program to be fiscally responsible. This is oxymoronic for any government program. Medicare: bankrupt. Social Security: bankrupt. Please quit voting for fiscally irresponsible programs that inevitably turn out more expensive than "expected." Listen to the CBO. Hear what they're saying about both HR3200 and the equally fiscally irresponsible Baucus permutation of health care "reform." Don't vote for either. And don't vote for any fraudulent anti-democratic "reconciliation" to force passage of health care legislation around the machinations of equally irresponsible Republicans.
Until you know exactly, within $100 million, what a ginormous new health care bureaucracy will cost, I'd suggest you not impose it on the economically suffering people of these formerly free united States. If you vote for a bill that you don't know the exact costs of, I will hold you fully responsible, and will make sure that your career as my Representative or Senator is as short as is electorially possible.
And how deceptive of all of you to push the full imposition of your destructive vision of our health care future beyond the 10-year accounting window used by the CBO. That's fraud on a massive basis. I will hold you accountable for that fraud in the next election.
If corporate CEOs behaved this way you'd use Sarbanes-Oxley to put them in jail.
Madoff defrauded in the billions. Youse guys commit fraud in the trillions.
Reset, reboot, restart, and look for the true causes of health care unaffordability: government interventions that have distorted the market for health care into an unrecognizable money pit. Once you have recognized these causes, repeal them. Only so can the people of these formerly free united States once again experience affordable, high quality health care.
Repent or electoral retribution is mine, saith this voter.
Earl
