The State claims to be looking out for your health care interests but like everything else they are not. They are building cartels that reward cronies and rent-seekers who then reward their political allies in government.
ObamaCare, Medicaid, and Medicaid expansion are not well-meaning safety-net programs. They are wealth redirection schemes that enrich cartels, and politicians at the expense of regular Americans.
Did you know, for example, that by design, ObamaCare incentivizes increasing health care costs to the benefit of the insurance industry and big hospitals?
Government interference limits administrative costs to 20% of all spending. So, 80% has to be “spent” on care and only 20% on operational costs. The only way to make more money is to spend more on actual care. The best way to do that is to charge more for the same care. So that’s what happens. You make the 80% cost more so that the 20% can be more.
To cover the perverse cost increase incentives insurance companies have to raise premiums. All because of Government meddling in the marketplace.
Hospitals are also buying up practices (competition) and cranking up prices to take advantage of the rules. With a virtual monopoly on services, and a growing monopoly by a handful of surviving insurers, either through mergers or acquisitions, or attrition, both sides can charge whatever they want and enrich their cartels under the umbrella of a piece of legislation named the ‘Affordable Care Act.’
Government. Did. This.
And that’s just a small smudge on the surface of the larger problem of government interference. In a recent podcast, Daniel Horowitz talks to Rep. Jim Butler of Ohio, a one-man think tank on health care, to discuss the compelling narrative conservatives should be pushing on health care.
Republicans are about to get crushed in the midterm elections, and health care is the top issue. Yet Republicans let the Left get away with murder – quite literally sometimes – on the health care issue by ignoring how they empowered and monopolized a cartel. Jim explains a number of ways government programs and interventions in health care have not only driven up costs but have destroyed private practice and degraded the quality and delivery of health care itself. He explains how Medicaid and the cartel monopoly helped fuel the addiction crisis with opioids.
There’s a lot in here for conservatives to work with at both the national and state level and I encourage activists to listen to at least the first 30 minutes. You need to hear about these perverse incentives and share them with candidates and other activists to develop narratives and policy priorities to stop or undo the abuse caused by government meddling in the healthcare market.
And yes, as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, it also ties into the opioid crisis and how Medicaid and Medicaid expansion are built to be abused which create addicts who then look to the streets for illicit opioids readily available because of open border policies, DACA, and other national security issues that allow drugs to pour in from China or Mexico.
Give it a listen. You really do need to hear this.
And while you are there, please look for GrokTALK! on Stitcher Radio. Thanks!
