At the time of this writing, America is struggling with what should be a primary argument against socialism or Marxism—what is popularly known as Obamacare. If you are from another country, please bear with me as we address this, because it does illuminate some of the ultimate issues between capitalism and socialism.
Before the government started taking over our healthcare system, America had the best healthcare in the world. It was one of our main exports as people came here from all over the world for medical treatment. Also, everyone in America, including illegal aliens, had free emergency healthcare. It was against the law for an emergency room to deny anyone emergency treatment. Good-hearted people provided many free clinics for non-emergencies to help the poor. There were problems, as there is with everything, but they could have been better fixed without a government takeover of the entire industry. This unprecedented overreach has already degraded the quality of the healthcare system, reduced the number of people it is available to, dramatically increased the costs, and the government has barely gotten started!
Our President promised that if we would let the government do it, everyone would soon have health insurance, and we would all save money. With the exception of defense and security, we do not have a single example of government managing anything well. When they try to do so, costs always go up and the quality of the product goes down. As we quickly discovered, the government could not even put a website together. Our healthcare costs have already skyrocketed, in some cases the same coverage costing ten times as much as before!
As we are now finding out, it is questionable whether the uninsured, those whom Obamacare was intended to help, will actually get coverage. The other three hundred million people are almost all going to end up paying much more for their coverage. Worse still, the entire healthcare system is being quickly degraded. Regardless of how good the intentions were, the results have been a nightmare for just about everyone, and the night has just begun.
As stated, we need government like we need officials to referee a sport. However, when government takes over an industry, it is like having the sports officials decide they are going to get involved in playing the game. Think about watching a soccer match in which the officials start jumping in and playing. It would be madness. So it is as our government takes over one of the biggest industries in America—healthcare.
No government exists that could take one of the most complex parts of our society—healthcare—and write a bill in just a few days, mostly done by congressional staffers, and come up with a better system. It was madness to even think this was possible. In case you have not noticed, what is happening in Washington is beyond dysfunctional, it is madness.
The wheels are coming off of Obamacare in a most dramatic and shocking way, yet it should not be a surprise to anyone who understands basic management. It was just announced that many times more people have already lost their present healthcare coverage than had been able to sign up for coverage on the government exchanges. This debacle will likely go down in history as one of the most extreme overreaches of government ever. Will we learn from it? If we follow the continuing cycle of history, the answer is probably not.
We may wonder why other countries have nationalized healthcare, so why couldn’t we do it? For one thing, no other country tried writing the law for their government to take over the extremely complex healthcare industry in less than two weeks. No other country had leaders saying to pass the bill first and then you can see what’s in it. This was a level of arrogance and incompetence that even communist countries would not have displayed.
When the Iron Curtain came down and we were able to really see what life under communism was like, one of the first discoveries was that the Soviet healthcare system was about four decades behind the West. Sure, it was free for everyone, but it was hardly worth what they paid—nothing! It could take years for your turn to come up for just an exam. It was the symbol of Soviet industry—those little two cycle cars that were available to Soviet citizens, only you had to wait sixteen years for one and pay over a year’s salary for it.
Almost anything a government bureaucracy does will be done very poorly and inefficiently. There are some great public servants in government, but the system and its mountains of red tape and regulations can hinder even the best from being efficient or effective. Our government may get the website fixed, but if it created such a train wreck just doing that, think about what it will do to our entire healthcare system. This debacle is going to cost many lives and is a very real threat to our entire economic system. It could also wake up America to what is being done to it and begin the kind of reform that could again release the most powerful economic engine the world has ever known—the engine that runs on freedom.