Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The Nightmare of Universal Health Care

The whole purpose of a health insurance company is to collect fees from the insured and to distribute as much as possible of those funds to the executives and owners of the insurance company. This is done by several means--for example, by increasing the cost of the insurance premiums, by denying and restricting services, and by reducing or withholding payments to providers after they deliver authorized services. Health insurance companies are among the most efficient methods in our economic system for transferring wealth from the lower classes to its rightful owners, the wealthy.

It should be clear to anyone who thinks about it that any single-payer, universal health-care plan would totally defeat the whole purpose of health insurance. The “owners” of the system would be the public at large. The executives would either be government employees or bureaucrats operating under the government’s thumb, who would be perversely motivated to provide actual services to the insured.

In fact, the whole enterprise would end up frittering away virtually all the money put into it on providing care for the wretched masses rather than enriching its owners. Moreover, as experience in the rest of the industrialized world shows, once any such system gets put in place, it will be virtually impossible to ever return to a normal and sane profit system, because the public will very quickly become addicted to the idea of getting health care that actually meets their tedious little needs rather than being satisfied with whatever the insurance companies decide to let them have.

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