Sunday, December 1, 2013

Socialism of the worst kind: taking from the poor to benefit the rich

Lately I've been getting a lot of emails from moveon.org trying to get me to sign petitions to support Obamacare or things I should do to stop the program from failing. A lot of these emails have pointed out a certain fact: that Obamacare needs the young to enroll in order for the program to work.

The reason for this is most young people don't need healthcare or need less than they would actually pay in health care premiums, this extra money is then used to take care of the older portion of the population whose contribution to the insurance company is less than what the insurance company pays to take care of them.

The problem? According to this report, the young are actually the ones that don't have the money. In fact much of my generation is unemployed. Blame who you will, the fact of the matter is most people in my age group are either 1) not employed or 2) not making much money.

So basically, this program relies on wealth redistribution from the poor to the wealthier. This is a travesty augmented by the fact that the young are the ones who need to start families before their fertility drops. Right now, our birth rate is below replacement (and adoption ain't cheap folks). Just having bad population growth in and of itself bankrupts socialist programs that rely on the young to pay for the old. So the young need to have kids AND fork out extra money to insurance companies to pay for the old's healthcare. Obamacare is a poorly designed system and it isn't helping with some of the larger issues the USA is facing.

Don't get me wrong, I think reform needed to happen. But the problem with Obamacare is that it focused on the cost of healthcare from the standpoint of the insurance companies instead of from the standpoint of the actual cost. Right now, we have a shortage of doctors. Right now, most of our doctors leave med school in huge amounts of debt. Both of those facts drive up health care cost. Prescriptions for the elderly cost a ton and too many politicians in Washington are in bed with the pharmaceutical companies to stop them from price gouging. That's why we passed legislation to subsidize them for the elderly instead of finding a way to drive down the costs in the market. Reforming the way insurance companies do business does little to alleviate the problem when most of them are coming from the industry itself.

But as you can tell from my analysis, my will to support a poorly designed law and poorly designed form of socialism is near zero. So every time I get those emails, I chuckle a little wishing I cared and move on with life.

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