— by Odysseus
Health Care for US, But Veterinary Care for You.
As the Republican Congress gets closer to repealing Obamacare, without actually repealing Obamacare, it is the role of The Cassandra Times to explain to you what is really happening and why. While the Republican Party may not have liked the specifics of Obamacare, its methods or priorities, the GOP was never opposed to an overhaul of the United States healthcare system.
In fact, Obamacare was simply continuing a project that had taken great leaps forward under the presidency of George W. Bush, when he expanded Medicare to include prescription drug coverage. It is a long term goal of the United States government to make taxpayers pay for universal health care coverage. The government broke the system in the 1940s, and, as usual, intends to use more government interference to “fix” what it broke.
Prior to World War II, few Americans had health insurance, and most policies covered only hospital care, room, board, and those services necessary for the hospital stay. During World War II, the number of persons with employment-based health insurance coverage started to increase for several reasons. Wages were frozen by the National War Labor Board in 1943 by Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when he issued executive order 9328, which, among other things, froze wages at their then present levels for workers.
Since big businesses sought a competitive edge in acquiring the best workers, but were forbidden by law from offering higher salaries, they began to offer employees health insurance, paid by the employer, in lieu of the higher salary that the federal government had prohibited. Health insurance was an attractive means of recruiting and retaining workers during the labor shortage for two reasons: 1) unions supported employment-based health insurance, and 2) workers’ health benefits were not subject to income tax or Social Security payroll taxes, as opposed to cash wages.
Then, as now, under the tax code, health insurance premiums paid by employers are deductible to employers as a business expense. In addition, they are nice fringe benefit for employees since they are not treated as taxable income. Since World War II, employees have come to expect that any decent employment includes health insurance as part of the compensation package. Over time, this has come to be a serious drain on essentially all businesses.
Let’s say that a company is in the business of manufacturing tires. It has employees who work on making tires and getting these tires to market. It has employees who buy all the raw materials to make the tires and it has office staff which makes sure that the bills are paid and payments are collected. This is the “tire “ business.
With the growing complexity and cost of providing health insurance to employees, the tire company has to pay an ever increasing amount to cover the employees’ insurance since only a portion of the insurance premiums are paid by the employee, while the bulk is still paid by the employer. Further, the tire company has to hire extra employees, whose entire job is dedicated to providing “health care” to other employees. These employees’ entire jobs are to manage the health care plans, enrollment, maintenance, and the recurring negotiation for new or updated group plans. In short, this tire business has to both spend money on employee health plans and also hire extra employees who do absolutely nothing in connection the company’s real purpose of making tires. Businesses like our hypothetical tire company want to conduct their own business, not manage their employees’ health care plans and deal with insurance companies.
All businesses, like our hypothetical tire company, compete on a world stage with tire companies in other countries who have some form of “national health service”. These foreign companies have a competitive advantage over American companies because they can focus on just making tires, or widgets, or whatever is their core business because they do not have to expend time and resources on their employees’ “health care”.
The Republican Party may have opposed “Obamacare”, but its donors, economists, and policy advisors universally advise some sort of revamp of the health care system that fundamentally ends the pre-Obamacare system and embraces Obamacare. The federal government and the Deep State, composed of both establishment Republicans and Democrats, agree with those American businesses, who think they could be more efficient, and profitable, if they could only foist the health care costs and headaches off onto the taxpayers in the form of the federal government, which gets it’s money directly from the taxpayers. That way the workers would then, once again, collectively, shoulder the full costs of their health care, as they did before the War Powers Board froze wages.
What the establishment and Deep State are not telling the American people is that, under this new version of nationalized health care, citizens/workers would no longer make their own health care decisions and pay their doctors when and how much they chose, as they did prior to the National Labor Relations Board action. Rather, the federal government would seize citizens/workers’ money in the form of taxes and, then, it would be the federal government that would make all the decisions about the health care rather than the people themselves.
This change effectively transforms the American health care system from being health care for people into veterinary care for animals. The cattle do not decide how much health care they receive. This is a decision for their owner, the rancher. Nor does the rancher send his own family to the veterinarian.
It is particularly worth noting that one of the few points of agreement in the recently failed “repeal and replace” bill in the United States Senate was to exempt the Senators, themselves, their families, and their staff from anything that they proposed to pass for the rest of us. On the animal farm, everyone is equal, but some pigs are more equal than others.
The government’s interest, as envisioned by the progressives since the late 1800s, is to have a healthy workforce. The government, like the rancher, wants healthy cattle producing wealth for it. Like the rancher, the government has an interest to avoid or to prevent pandemics, and to protect against any other health issues that prevent the cattle/workers/citizens working within the economy from producing. This is the same interest that the rancher has in keeping his cattle from becoming sick … but no more than that. For the government, healthy and productive citizens have value only so long as they can be kept healthy and productive in a cost-efficient manner. If any individual citizen’s health care is deemed by the rancher to be too expensive for the animal’s “value”, then the rancher decides that the health care is cut off.
While we at The Cassandra Times do not claim that government bureaucrats would actually call a veterinarian to “put down” any citizen who was no longer sufficiently valuable, they would undoubtedly be in the business of deciding when to stop lifesaving care. We can see this already happening in the United Kingdom’s National Health Care services with its decision to cut off care for critically-ill baby Charlie Gard.
Once again, we encounter the familiar problem that governments are not the dispassionate dispensers of just decisions, which all communists like to pretend to be true. Governments are composed of individual human beings, who will be the ones assigning a relative “value” to each citizen/worker. Naturally, the government worker himself and his loved ones will be assigned the highest “value” for getting premium health care. Other individuals will be assessed based upon their value to the government or what they can offer to bribe a government official to raise the medical worthiness of their loved ones. It would be neither difficult nor inaccurate to predict a dystopia, in which lifesaving health care was dependent upon delivering to the decision makers a suitcase full of cash or performing a “Lewinski”. Thus, it is no wonder that the federal government and its Deep State officials gleefully look forward to granting themselves this windfall of infinite power.
Only under the pre-World War II model, prior to the common use of “health insurance” as a perk by big businesses, are individuals and families the ones making their own personal decisions as to how much of their own resources they choose to expend on their health care. When they, themselves, are the ones who decide that a loved one is “too far gone”, only then are we operating in a health care system where sentient beings have the dignity of making the ultimate choices of life and death for themselves or their loved ones. Conversely, when government or insurance companies make this choice, over the decisions or wishes of the human beings involved, then this is veterinary care for people.
Government bureaucrats do not have to call it a “death panel”, and it is likely that they will call it a “Medical Resources Conservation Adversary Board”, or some other similar banal, bland, and bureaucratic obfuscation. The name will not change the fact that it will be a “death panel” and that it will be making the veterinary decision of when to put the “horse” down. They will not even have known the “horse’s” name or have ever fed it a sugar cube. No love, just econometrics.
On second thought, what the federal government, the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Deep State want for us, National Health Service, is even worse than veterinary care.