Mythusmage Opines

If you’d like to read the health care reform legislation people are talking about, you can get it here. This post is my impression of the thing as a whole.

The first thing to note is that it is big. One thousand eighteen pages in all. It also covers a lot of territory, with many parts, titles, sections, sub-sections and so on and so forth. It is very much an omnibus bill, incorporating many smaller bills within. And that is the problem.

My problem with it is the basic philosophy behind it. It starts with the assumption that people as a whole cannot handle things for themselves, that they need help. It is socialist, and statist at that. Statist in that it assumes that there is a unique entity called the state which exists separate of the people it represents. It also imparts to the state a wisdom unique to this entity. In all it either forgets, or it ignores the fact that this mythical state is a product of the people that compose it. That the United States is us and would not exist if not for us.

Some say this attitude is Nazism. It’s not. It’s closer to Mussolini’s Fascism than it is to Hitler’s Nazism. While the two ideologies were related, Nazism incorporated racism and the idea of the people as a distinct racial entity. Fascism was meant to be universal in its application, Nazism to be applied for the benefit of one race and one race only. Insofar as this bill uses statist thinking applied to everyone, it is fascist in the original sense.

The bill is drafted to put everybody under a government health plan. That is the gist of it. Along with some elements that do good things, there are parts where physicians are required to report to the government on what they have been doing. Ostensibly this is to assure quality of care, but this assurance is another layer of oversight upon those provided by the legal system and the medical fraternity itself. While both the latter do need some serious reform, adding another layer of oversight is not the way to go about it.

You get right down to it, my biggest complaint with this bill is that it assumes we are utter fools incapable of taking care of ourselves. That we need to be watched over and coddled and tended like a young infant. It refuses to let us be responsible for ourselves. We are not to be allowed to fail. Neither are we to be allowed to succeed.

Have you ever considered that some people have earned their status in live. There are those who are incompetent. There are those who are just plain stupid. There are sub-cultures in this country that value failure and actively seek to drag down those in the community who wish to succeed. We have pockets of cultures of jealousy and envy who will do anything to insure that their members fail, and keep failing.

Just consider the stories of lottery winners who squander their new gained wealth. Yes, there are people like that. People who waste what they have because they act without foresight and prudence. The health care reform bill assumes we’re all like that, that we can’t do for ourselves.

And we reinforce that view by complaining about medical costs and relying on insurance to pay for it for us. Insurance has made it possible for us to think we’re getting free health care, forgetting that insurance, private or public, does not pay for us, but spreads the cost among its customers.

Private medical insurance is based on the idea that most people are healthy, will remain healthy, and will rarely—if ever—call upon their insurance to cover their medical costs. Their medical premiums will go to the insurance company to help pay for costs, and the surplus to be applied to investments and profits. Your insurance company makes money when you’re healthy. When your insurance has to pay for a treatment or drug, they are paying from a pool provided by all their customers. When you send that premium check in, you are paying for Uncle Jed’s hernia operation in Biloxi, Grandma Martha’s hip-replacement in Portland Maine, and Cousin Sherill’s detox in Sacramento. You think about it, insurance is privatized socialism. Think further, think about all the people it takes to support the few who actually need insurance to cover their medical bills, and you realize that medical insurance is a sort of ponzi scheme. So long as you remain healthy and relatively prosperous, you are subsidizing the medicine provided those not as healthy as you, or not as successful.

Do some people need help? Well of course. I’m an example of those people, for I have a serious and debilitating disability in Clinical Depression. There are people far worse off than me. But the great majority of Americans can pay for their medical care themselves in most cases. To be blunt about it, you don’t need to have insurance pay for a doctor visit or most medications. This is why insurance companies have deductibles you get to pay, not that you get the hint.

And so we can see that we are the reason for the health care reform bill. We are responsible for this act of statism because we insist we be taken care of even when we are capable of taking care of ourselves. We find responsibility onerous and wish it taken from our shoulders, forgetting the fact that being successful, prospering, requires self-responsibility. We need to risk our selves in order to win. Statism tells us we can just get by if we only turn over everything to something that doesn’t even exist.

It comes down to this, I oppose this bill because it dehumanizes us. It makes us dependent upon a system that has no real concern for us, only an institutional efficiency established for the benefit of the workers it employs. It is a step towards reducing us to an undifferentiated mass that cannot be separated into its component parts. It says we are all of a kind, all the same, and that is what I hate.

I will admit that I really don’t know all that much about Karl Marx and his philosophy. I do know that Marx held that the end of all the social progression he talked about was a state where Man lived in a society where all cooperated of their  own free will for the benefit of all. You get right down to it, Marxism carried to its logical extreme is a lot like Libertarianism, only with a social conscience. Statism contradicts Marxism. While I doubt very much Marxism is workable thanks to human nature, I can see where, used wisely, it can improve life and encourage individual responsibility. Statism in any form can have no such role because of the thinking that informs it. The health care reform bill is statist, anti humanity, and thus cannot benefit anyone to anything more than a superficial degree should it be enacted.

That is why I oppose it.