Medical Care: Part IV

This is the fourth in a series of posts about American medical care and the government’s attempts to meddle in it. Posts about other topics may appear between them. The first three posts can be read here, here, and here.

Enacting tort reform.

Removing the maze of government mandates that require medical insurers to cover all sorts of non-critical and elective procedures, even if their customers want an option to purchase catastrophic-only coverage.

Allowing medical insurance to be purchased across state lines (or in other words, opening the insurance market rather than closing it).

These are steps government can take that would, without doubt, drive down the prices American consumers must now pay to secure medical care. They would accomplish that goal without any negative side effects to care, and without government intruding into the personal affairs of the entire population under the ruse of helping the small percentage that is truly unable to obtain care.

And notably, these steps could be taken quickly because Republicans would support them. In fact, Republicans have been championing them for some time but are always rebuffed by the liberal elites who rule the roost.

If Obama & Co. were really interested in improving medical care or access to it, they could have already started that snowball rolling down the hill by proposing these steps and passing them with bipartisan support. They could already be claiming credit for taking action to "help working families," and Obama could be saying that the bipartisan support proves he is what he claimed to be during the campaign: a uniter not a divider, a pragmatic centrist interested only in results, all that jazz. Any grander steps could be pursued after the fact, and Obama could claim that he shares General Patton's belief that "a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow."

But these commonsense, winning measures (plus several others which fit that description) are being ignored at best, and brushed aside at worst.

It is telling that Obama & Co. continue to ignore the obvious steps while deploying blitzkrieg tactics to push for ones that are, to say the least, dubious. What it tells us is that Obama & Co.'s goal is not to improve your health or your life, but to control them. History shows that if we allow them to succeed, we do so at our own peril -- and more importantly, at our descendants' peril.