Amerika

We have 328 million American citizens and no one seems to have a plan to make healthcare work. Our largest generation, the Boomers, will live longer than any generation before them. As they stop paying into the system, our smaller generations are being joined by a caravan of greedy mouths coming from the south. Unless we come up with a solution, the system will break.

Before we can discover a path to escape, we should look at the path we have taken to get to the present-day mess. We live in a society of needy, greedy babies; politicians win elections by promising free stuff, not mentioning obligations of the citizen. People like the idea of a safety net, and every last individual receiving care, but the cost to society at large proves unsustainable.

The Left argues for their oldest solution, namely pouring money on the problem like water on a fire. However, despite our high spending, we are still far from completing their plan. The Right benefits from being able to attack the Leftist plan without having to offer one of their own. Both sides dance around the issue, benefitting from the zeal or righteous anger of their bases.

Prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACT), people were not uniformly covered, which caused some to end up in debt when life-threatening circumstances required extensive care. With the ACA, however, see that bills of this type simply transfer power to administrative agencies as to which pre-existing conditions they will pay for, with the list of excluded treatments expanding here as it did in the UK and Canada after their socialized medical systems began to run out of money. This is what happens when we search for policy in terms of legitimacy, not validity as a means to accomplish an end goal.

The Left wants to continue its partnership with insurance and the poor in transferring money from the American middle class, but we are increasingly creeping toward an inescapable appointment with something that looks a lot like Medicare-for-all. Since the free rider question disposes us to assume that the only requirements for our policy are economic, we debate this issue in terms of implementation while sleepwalking toward the same “socialized medicine” that Leftists in the 1960s desired.

In the meantime out here in middle America, we just want a way for most people to get reasonably affordable healthcare without all of us going near-bankrupt from taxes. We are not just geographically in the middle of the nation but politically and symbolically so. We are opposed to the bugman-style reasoning which focuses on self-interest of the individual instead of the needs of a people as a whole. This division ensures that we cannot accept the Leftist ideal, even if we like many parts of it.

We find ourselves wondering why this problem seems so intractable, and this leads us to its uniquely American character. Switzerland implemented a private industry healthcare insurance plan, but several key differences distinguish them from us. They have a consisent-enough cultural layout. They have solid banking. They have a stable population which is united in its customs. They rely on the agencies of the single market of the EU despite being non-members. We are in a different situation as a superpower with a diverse population and less consistency in our agencies.

With the many factors in America interacting as they do, it becomes clear that we will not have a planned transition to a new healthcare system. Instead of active proposals, our system will disrupt itself until it collapses and is replaced by the natural market, since when you take government out of healthcare, you have the private systems of medicine and insurance which — newly unencumbered by regulations — will sell us what we need, and at a much lower price.

In this way, Trump is doing what is right about American healthcare: do not repeal and replace, simply destroy. Sabotage the failing bureaucracy, the bloated industry that feeds on it, and the underclass which will always take but never initiate affirmative acts to provide for themselves. The longer we try to fix an impossible system, the longer it will take to resolve. The only real “fix” is to accelerate the remaining ruins into soot and let the markets clean up where politics failed.

Tags: affordable care act, healthcare, insurance