Saturday, August 15, 2009

Notes on the Non-Debate

HR3200 was a grab bag of treats for big insurance. The program forces everyone to buy insurance, but shuffles off many of the really bad customers to a public plan or to competitors without the well greased connections in Washington.

To pass the Bill, Obama has been framing the opposition as shills of the insurance industry. The Democratic super majority will then sit down with insurance company lobbyists. Come up with an even sweeter deal for insurance companies with even more of our healthcare dollars diverted into campaign donations for 2010 and 2012.

Having framed the Republicans as shills of the insurance company, the Democrats will then come out an treat the even sweeter deal for insurance companies as some sort of compromise with the teabagging mobsters.

A compromise with the image that one projects on others is not really a compromise, now, is it? A compromise with the image projected on others is a form of self-delusion.

I find Obama to be extremely frustrating. He is really good at picking up on the problem.

Obama is 100% right that there is something dreadfully wrong with third party payment systems.

The answer is to find ways to get people's healthcare dollars out of the hands of third parties and into the hands of the people so that they can directly negotiate with their healthcare provider.

Obama could be a great president. But he was trained in left leaning schools rife with Marxist thought. The problem with this type of thinking it that it clouds one's thoughts. They see issues in terms of conflicts, enemies and friends. It destroys the ability to look at the problems and find a real solution.

At this moment, Obama appears to be defining the insurance companies as the enemy. He appears to be projecting motives onto the opposition.

Rather than taking this approach, I wish he would look at the long history of health care reform. It has been a steady drive to give insurance companies tax breaks and subsidies so that they can crowd out other methods of funding health care.

If we hate the status quo, shouldn't we look at reversing the decades of insurance reform that led to the status quo. The status quo is a convoluted system that heaves tax breaks on employer based insurance. This status quo created the artificial dependence on third parties and has inflated medical costs.

To break this status quo, we need politicians who can look outside the little boxes created by the indoctrination at our partisan universities.

It is so frustrating to watch an intelligent person march down the wrong path because he failed to rise above the filters created by the education system.

1 comment:

Scott Hinrichs said...

The insurance companies are on board with this tactic. They don't mind being made the villain as long as it works out for them in the end.

Just consider the fact that the insurance company lobby has committed $80 million to an autumn campaign to sell Obamacare. That's more money than Sen. McCain spent on his entire presidential campaign.

With the Soros folks and the insurance industry folks funding the pro side of this debate, who does that leave to fund the con side?

What we see here is the President focusing his energy on the one thing he has shown that he can do well: run a political campaign.