Health Care Plan is Socialist Redistribution of Wealth

Mr. President:

I believe your push for national, universal health care is disingenuous.  You have promoted it as a way to lower health care costs and to address the “crisis” of having so many uninsured.  Let me address both issues and tell you why I am in strong opposition to government-provided universal health care.

1.  Medicaid and Medicare already are providing government healthcare to millions of Americans.  These programs have been run very poorly, with rampant fraud, inefficiency, rationed care, and often substandard care.  Yet, these programs are horribly expensive to the country.  How will increasing the number of people covered by government health care by 700% or more result in health care savings?  The government can’t even run the programs it has in place efficiently, despite their comparative small size.  I have absolutely no confidence that expanding the reach of the government will lead to lower costs or greater efficiency.  The USPS, Social Security Administration, and Amtrak certainly haven’t been cost effective examples of government services.  It would be difficult to think of any cost effective government services currently offered.  So, why is there any expectation that national health care would be any different?

2.  If the government providing health care is truly about saving money on health care, then why is there a need to raise anyone’s taxes to provide it?  If the government’s involvement will make it more cost effective shouldn’t it be self-funding?  Instead the House is proposing astronomical tax increases on high income individuals and small businesses.  This is like killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  If you add a 5.4% income tax on those making $1 million or more a year, I suspect you will see far fewer people making more than $1 million a year.  This appears to me more of an issue of punishing those who have succeeded in a free market economy and redistributing their wealth.  Isn’t that socialism?  You claim to be a big fan of Lincoln, but your ideas are far different than his.  Lincoln was famous for saying, “You can’t help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.”

3.  I don’t think we have a crisis with our health care system.  The estimates that I keep hearing from congress are that 15% of the people in this country don’t have health insurance.   That equals about 45 million people.  Yet, there is significant evidence to suggest that 30-35 million of those people either have high earnings and are choosing not to buy insurance, are young and healthy and choose not to buy insurance because they believe they are invincible, are eligible for insurance coverage paid for by others but have failed to enroll, or are illegal aliens.  If the true number of uninsured U.S. citizens who don’t have access to healthcare or who truly can’t afford it is equal to 10-15 million people, that represents less than 5% of the population.  While there may be ways that we can help that 5% of the population, a government health care program estimated to cost at least $1 trillion just to implement is a bad idea.  If you divide $1 trillion by an estimate of 15 million people who don’t have access to health care and/or can’t afford it, this amounts to $67,000 per person.

If you are serious about making health care more affordable I would suggest three things:  1, significant medical tort reform; 2, a more efficient, quicker, less costly FDA approval process; and 3, pro-business legislation that will increase the wages and wealth of people and businesses to give them more money to spend on health care (i.e. tax cuts for high earners, tax cuts for business, programs that support and encourage entrepreneurial risk, choice and competition in education, elimination of select onerous business-inhibiting federal regulations, energy independence through domestic drilling and nuclear, rejecting ridiculous cap and trade legislation, etc.).

Government healthcare is an expensive wealth redistribution program.  I will actively vote and campaign against any elected official that supports such a plan.