Watch Out For "Hillary-Care"... again

With the Democrats in charge of both the Senate and the House, you can count on Hillary Clinton to try to get her Universal Health Care plan through again.

Just a refresher for those who were not paying attention in 1992, Clinton's plan was basically geared toward central planning of our health care system. They argued that we had too many specialists, too many MRI machines, and too much technology. They wanted to control and limit the number of doctors in specialties and cut down on investment.

The first thing they did was try to demonize the pharmaceutical industry, as they, the Democrats, are starting to now. They claim they are ripping people off and are too profitable. So they want government to negotiate prices which would go a long way in killing any incentive for further research and development. The profit incentive works for the pharmaceutical industry by giving them the incentive to develop miracle drugs that have extended the lives of millions of people throughout the world. Profits provide companies with the incentive to risk their assets to develop drugs for cures. Without that incentive, these companies would just keep stamping out the same old drugs without developing new ones.

In addition, many of the pharmaceutical companies have programs that provide free prescription drugs to families that earn $35,000 or less.

Democrats also like to point out that 40 million Americans are without health insurance . However, if you look at the most recent CBO study on health insurance, half of those people are covered by insurance some time during the year. They are, most often between jobs. Then there are those who are long term uninsured who many are young people who choose not to be insured and prefer to spend their money on other things. So I would estimate that there are fewer then 10 million people out of 300 million who are uninsured in our country which comes to 3.33%. Those 10 million get free care through Emergency Rooms. For this, the Democrats what to overhaul our health care system.

The current cost escalation problem in our health care system is because of government intervention through Medicaid and Medicare. Medicare began in 1965 and cost taxpayers $3 Billion a year. The projection in 1965 was that it would cost $9 Billion a year by 1990 when the actual cost was $67 Billion. Today it costs $277 Billion a year of 13% of the federal budget.

The problem is that if the government pays for all your medical needs, you, through human nature, are going to see the doctor and seek more treatments then you would if you had to pay for some or all of it. This is the fatal flaw in socialized medicine. In a real life example with me, in the early 1990s, my company introduced an insurance that paid for all office visits 100%. We had just had our first child and we were at the doctor every week for every little thing. If we were to pay for these visits out of our own pocket we would have not have gone nearly as much. As it turns out, all the employees in the company did the same as my wife and I and the program went broke in less than a year and my company went back to traditional coverage.

We need to take the government out of our health care and allow the free market and competition to work it's magic. Deregulation is the answer. The system needs to be returned to the market place. This will bring down prices of our medical care and pharmaceuticals.