Today, at exactly 11:55 a.m., Easter Standard Time, President Barack Obama officially set into motion the socialization of the American healthcare industry by signing a law that states by 2014, every citizen in the United States will be required to purchase health insurance, and a national healthcare program similar to medicare will be available to those too impoverished to afford a private plan. A fine will be imposed on those that refuse to purchase insurance, therefore ensuring that every taxpayer, in one way or another, will pay into a new national health insurance program. Another common term for this type of system is the Single Payer system, single meaning everyone. It is unclear whether or not the irony in the phrase was intentional.
If one wanted to socialize medicine in this country, how would they go about it? Would you introduce a bill into the Congress that dissolves the private health insurance companies directly? Of course not, no such legislation would survive a single committee, much less the entire House of Representatives. The way you would have to do it is if you designed a kind of domino effect that could only logistically and inevitably result in the desired outcome. You don't take control of the private sector outright, you simply make it impossible for it to sustain its own existence.
Some of the ways you do this is by first mandating that every single man woman and child in this country have health insurance, similar to the way auto insurance is done today. Then, you would identify virtually every way an insurance company makes profit-gains, (examining pre-existing conditions, etc.), the ways in which they determine their premiums, deductibles and coverage amounts, and essentially make them illegal. You would have to be careful to make sure the legislation explicitly states that it is illegal for THEM to exclude an individual from coverage for a pre-existing condition, not that it is illegal to exclude individuals for pre-existing conditions altogether. This is a very important distinction to make, for in the future, it will be necessary for the government to occasionally deny care to an individual for a condition they feel was self-inflicted. After all, the government can't endorse obesity or smoking by providing coverage for individuals suffering from diabetes, lung cancer or emphysema. That would send out the "wrong message." The government would have to make a statement about unhealthy living habits by denying individuals that suffer from ailments caused by them.
The unbeatable competitiveness of the government program's premiums will progressively degenerate private health insurance companies. Intuitively, one would think that mandating everyone purchase health insurance from the very people that are the focus of the complaints would be counter-productive. But the left's calculations are sound, the majority of the 32 million that do not currently have coverage will qualify for government programs, per the new legislation. A large number of individuals that are currently covered will be inclined to find a way through the new legislation to qualify for them as well. When people realize that they can purchase a private plan for say 50 dollars a paycheck or a government subsidized option for 10 dollars a month, the vast majority of citizens in this country will willingly participate in the newly designed National Healthcare Service of America. (NHS).
If the government takes on millions upon millions of more people, and it's against the law to engage in profit-seeking behavior like minimizing loss by excluding for pre-existing conditions, no private insurance company in the world will be able to compete with it. As a matter of shear metaphysics, healthcare will have to become socialized.
*Side Note: I found it quite ironic when I took this photograph that he was signing the law directly in front of a young boy named Marcellus Owens, 11, who will be responsible for the debt the law will cause. We can only imagine how he will feel about that moment when he is President Obama's age.
