Call a roofer and tell them your roof needs to be replaced.  “Who’s the insurance company,” they’ll ask.  Tell them there’s no insurance.  Compare that price to the one you get from another roofer who thinks insurance is involved. 

Take your car in for repair of hail damage.  “Who’s the insurance company,” they’ll ask.  Once again, tell them there is none.  Compare that price to the one you get from another body shop under the impression that insurance is involved. 

The presence of third party payment or guarantees distorts the marketplace.  The presence of third party insurance and its effect on the market is insignificant to the distortion created by Uncle Sam, however.  Guess what the presence of student loan guarantees by Uncle Sam did to tuition charged by colleges in the U.S.?  Guess what effect these guarantees had on the amount of consumer credit held by Uncle Sam?  Best of all, guess what happened to the delinquency rate when Uncle Sam took these over in 2010.  It’s all here if you’d like to see it.

So what will everyone having health “insurance” do to the cost of health care?  If you said DUH?! you go to the head of the class.  Yet that was the thrust of the Unaffordable Care Act (UCA).  Soaring costs were the point, the government’s goal.  This will give the big insurance companies their excuse for massive premium increases, creating wild profits for them.  People will scream for the government to rescue them.  Rather than accept the blame they will deserve, they will push further as part of their plan and usher in their single payer system.  The country will be carved up for the few remaining insurance wolves to devour.  They will receive their premiums and make even bigger profits from extreme rationing, unimpeded by any threat of competition.  

We will have an opportunity to discuss the costs of care.  It will be brief, however, as the push for this national plan will come close on the heels of this most recent act.  Look at what your hospital bill was if you have had surgery, then look at the prices on our site.  We are making money at these prices.  Hospitals down the street charge 10 times what we do many times yet claim to make no profit.  They want everyone to have insurance so they’ll make even more money.  Not satisfied with their untold billions in profits, the insurance companies, prime authors of the UCA, have now made it a crime to not purchase their scam.  

Libertarians often say that government has no money that it didn’t first take from you at the point of a gun.  I guess the same can be said about health insurance now.  The uninsured actually served to keep a lid on prices partly due to leaked stories of greedy hospitals bankrupting the sick.  Insurance for all will take the lid off, just as the authors of the UCA hoped. 

G. Keith Smith, M.D.