House Bill Enslaving the US, Passes

I actually like the headline James Joyner puts up at a bit better:

House Trades Freedom for Health Coverage, Senate’s Move

The House passed a trillion dollar bill that will force Americans to buy health insurance, force even small businesses to provide health coverage, and require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions.  (The last, as I have previously argued, makes it something other than “insurance.”)

Just so. James adds further along…

James Joyner

If this became law, the poor would be significantly poorer and small businesses would be even less competitive with the big box stores.  During a very weak economy with an unemployment at ten percent, no less.  Oh, and insurance rates will go up for the rest of us, too, as companies amortize the cost of absorbing people who have costly illnesses — who will by definition be a net drain on the pool from Day 1 — by passing it on to the rest of us.

Just so, James.

He goes on:

Moreover, this plan does nothing to address the fundamental problem with the status quo:  The unsustainable skyrocketing in health care costs.

In fact, the government’s involvement flat out guarantees prices will go up. A look at the healthcare costs vs governmental involvement over the last 50 years shows the more governmental mandates on healthcare, the more the cost of healthcare goes up, in an almost exponential fashion.

Now there are those who will charge that the Republicans haven’t done anything about healthcare costs either. Thing is, the real answer to higher costs, given the well known trends of costs of ANYTHING involving government, would be to get government OUT of the healthcare business outright. We know how that will go over in the power-mad halls fo the Congresscrtters, now, don’t we?

Rick Moran, over at Right Wing Nut House weighs in also:

Rick Moran

A bill nobody has read, that contains nobody knows what, that no one has a clue of what kind of impact it will have on the current health care system, with a cost known only to God, has been passed with no formal hearings, extraordinarily limited debate, and in a totally partisan manner (minus one Republican who doesn’t have a prayer in 2010).

That’s the “reality” I would say to my friends in the reality based community. Can you argue with any of those points above? Only if you spin so hard you are in danger of flying off into orbit.

If we had a rational government, any one of those realities would have derailed health care reform long ago. But rationality has left the building, as has common sense, proportionality, wisdom, and that fine old conservative virtue, prudence.

Just so… in both the exact wording and the implications.  This monster was put forward on pure political power grounds.

As to the other shoe, I wonder if it’s going to drop at all. If it does, it’s as Rick says:

…. history tells us that it will never be repealed, that one sixth of the American economy will be permanently controlled by Washington. There will be successful efforts to play around at the margins, bringing efficiencies and changing some of the more odorous aspects of what is to come. But politicians have never taken away an entitlement in history, and I am extremely skeptical that it can be done in this case.

Once the independent health insurance industry is gone, how to you get it back? How do you reconstitute a private health care system? The answer is you can’t. Once national health care has had its way with the system and we see single payer insurance, and a health care bureaucracy that dictates treatments, costs, eligibility, as well as rationing what care is left, it will be impossible to ditch that system in favor of a market based, private entity. It is much easier for government to destroy private industry than it is for government to actually create a free market for health care. The very act of government creation would, by definition, not allow the market to determine the parameters of its operation.

The only saving grace here is if there is anyone on the planet that’s more inept than Nancy Pelosi, it’s Harry Reid. Thereby the chances of passage in any form is somewhat lower.

Rick wonders, from his (what I think to be) overtly centrist perspective about the future of conservatism in the context of this monster becoming law. I will go a little wider… I wonder about the future of America.