Some supporters of President Obama’s massive overhaul of our national health care system have compared the individual mandate to the requirement that drivers purchase car insurance.
The analogy is fatally flawed for two reasons: driving a car is a privilege, not a right, as mandated healthcare for everybody has been said to be.
In other words, if you neither own nor drive a car, you don’t have to buy car insurance.
The second reason the analogy doesn’t work is that the minimum required insurance doesn’t protect you…it covers the other guy when you are at fault.
Liability insurance covers the people who might get injured because of your improper exercise of your privilege to operate a car, assuming you have a driver’s permit and minimum coverage.
To have your own car fixed when you are at fault, you need to buy collision insurance.
The “individual mandate” now declared a new tax was opposed by almost eighty percent, nearly four out of five American voters prior to the official release of the court opinion.
It stands to reason that more people will oppose this very onerous, punitive and unpopular new tax levied on a select members of the middle class.
Why selected members of the middle class? Remember, the court also ruled that entire states can “opt out” or refuse to implement Obamatax without paying a Medicare penalty.
Republican governors on record have already announced that’s exactly what they plan to do. According to Eric Cantor, the vote to repeal Obamatax is now scheduled for July 11th, only a couple of weeks away.
Even if passed by a strict party line vote, the repeal will clear the House, putting all the pressure and attention on the Democrat-held Senate.
And, as someone at Slate astutely observed, The Filibuster Won’t Save ObamaCare From President Romney. Like I said, John Roberts is a genius.
The ugliest myth of this whole ObamaCare charade was to suggest that people without adequate health care through no fault of their own would benefit from the largesse of Barack Obama.
Granted, some people that truly need help would have gotten it. The good news is, we can still solve this problem after we get rid of Obamatax.
We need portability of health care coverage and more freedom in the insurance markets to conduct business across state lines, but those are secondary concerns to the biggest problem needing reform to improve health care and lower costs.
Remember, when asked whether an elderly patient would qualify for a pacemaker under his new healthcare law, Obama famously said, “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”
Think about it…under ObamaCare, the problem won’t be that doctors refuse to treat patients who won’t pay. The problem will be that patients with the ability to pay will not be given the option, by a new class of government bureaucrats more interested in taking their money for purposes of redistribution than caring for the individual.
Remember how Nancy Pelosi famously told us the bill had to be passed so that “we could find out what’s in it?”
Now we know. More taxes and four thousand new IRS agents. And politicians to decide matters of life or death.
It stands to reason that there must be a less onerous, more cost-effective way to fix our problems with health care. However, before we can do that we must properly identify the biggest problem in order to solve it.
While in my humble opinion, I still believe Chief Justice John Roberts will be hailed as a genius and the man who saved America over the test of time, very important work remains to be done for his good work to bear full fruit.
And what is the most important change necessary to make health care more affordable? In two words: tort reform.
Disgraced former Democrat Senator and Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards should become the poster boy for nationwide opposition to frivolous lawsuits.
His entire career and fortune was a direct result of his having “pioneered the art of blaming psychiatrists for patients who commit suicide and blaming doctors for delivering babies with cerebral palsy” in medical malpractice litigation.
Edwards won more than thirty cases of “medical malpractice” with judgments in excess of $1 million, which explains how his net worth was over $50 million dollars.
It does not explain why someone with $50 million dollars of his own money needed donors to provide a slush fund to help obscure his sordid affair and illegitimate child while participating in a presidential election campaign, all while his wife was dying of cancer. But that has nothing to do with the need for tort reform.
Think the problem of frivolous lawsuits is overblown?
Consider this recent example in my home state of Georgia, where a woman won a malpractice judgment against a cardiologist for $3 million dollars after her husband died during an adulterous menage-a-trois.
Apparently the doctor was supposed to have anticipated the man would be inclined to engage in such “strenuous behavior” and warned the lecherous pervert.
In the future, when the doctor gives such a warning, he can expect to be sued for defamation of character.
Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
And since when have doctors been required to be better psychics than Carnac the Magnificent?
Okay, enough levity, now for some brevity…what can we do?
Annoy the hell out of our Congresspeople, that’s what.
The TEA party and Occupy Wall Street movements have each shown us that a mobilized public scares the crap out of the career politicians in Washington.
Let’s make them really cower, by the power of the people, from now until November.
Call and write your Senator and Representative and give them a message in five short words.
Repeal ObamaCare. Pass tort reform.
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