Most of the time when we talk about why the House passed health care bill is such a disaster, we focus on things like the creation of government insurance that will undercut and eventually displace private insurance, the huge cost, how it will drive up insurance prices for families, and push even more people out of work by raising the cost of employment for businesses.
Big problems to be sure, but the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner reminds us of the more fundamental flaw with the legislation: it is a tremendous loss of freedom for individuals and a transfer of power from the people to the state:
…the bill uses the command “shall” — as in “you shall do this,” “businesses shall do that” and “government shall do some other thing” — 3,345 times.
Not a great deal of choice or options there.
To make sure that we obey these “shalls,” the bill would create 111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar bearing the Orwellian title “commissioner of health choices.”
All this would come at a true cost of more than $1.3 trillion over 10 years. And virtually every aspect of health care would be subject to federal regulation.
Proponents of the bill talk about it mostly as an effort to cover the uninsured. But that’s really not the bill’s main effect. This bill puts the government in charge of dictating just about every aspect of the health care sector.
This isn’t how America’s supposed to work. There’s been a lot of talk this week about the enduring love of freedom… let’s hope people out there recognize that freedom is the main casualty of Pelosi-care.