Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The public option will not be competition

Nancy Pelosi announced the other day that she no longer wants to call the public option a public option but a competitive option. She wants to do this so people don't confuse it with a government run option but as a capitalistic one.

Look, a public option by any other name is still a government run program. The goal is to make look as good as possible in order to sell it. They will tell us it will increase competition, that states can opt out if they want, or that you can keep your current insurance if you like it. But, in the end, we all know these are only lies to sell the program. In the end, this will end up being a single payer health insurance system. Even if things aren't added in right now they will be down the line. It's called the slippery slope.

The goal of the public option, so they say, is to lower costs because it will cause more competition. If the government option has lower prices they say other insurance companies will lower prices. Yet what they don't tell you is that the government health insurance plan does not have to make a profit. It is run by the government. It can run under a debt. Private companies have to make a profit. They can only risk so much. The government program can risk a lot because it's the government you see.

Say for instance private health insurance company A offers insurance at $250 a month. The government option can offer this at $200 a month. This will force many companies to start buying the public option and saving $50 a month. At first this looks good, until you look at the whole picture which we like to do here at Freadom Nation.

When you consider that at $250 a month the insurance company A is only making a profit of 2-3%. There is no way it's owners can lower prices to compete. So in the end he will be forced to go out of business because cannot afford to compete with the government option. You see here how private insurance companies will go under and people will ultimately have no choice but to use the public option. That's the goal all along.

Plus there are regulations on private insurance companies that won't exist for the public option. Right now residents of Michigan cannot buy health insurance options from Texas which may be less expensive with better quality. Michigan residents have to buy health care in Michigan. Or, once the public option is in place, they will have the less expensive public option as an option.
This is why I think the better option for healthcare reform would be to allow competition between health insurance companies throughout the country instead of regulating them and preventing competition -- which is what the public option will do. If you want realcompetition you don't need a government option, all you need to do is cut regulations and you'll have all the competition you want.

The dirty little secret here is that liberals in Washington don't want more competition. They want less competition. Yet, in order to sell their socialism to us, they tell us that the public option will increase competition. Since capitalism is popular, that's what they feign. It's the same way they pretend to be conservative during election cycles. It's a game they like to play.

Of course as soon as all the private health insurance companies go out of business the government will increase the price of the public option to $300 a month and still force you to buy it even though you are 25 years old and would rather spend the money on a car payment or something fun. The government will have to increase prices because the economy will tank as a result of all this liberalism. Capitalism as we know it will end, and the slippery slope will be in full
force.

You can see that there is a part of me that believes this is by design. Liberalism, you see, is just a sweatened name for (ahem) socialism.

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