Obamacare Will Harm Everyone. Do Not Fund It. Repeal It.

Many have said that once Obamacare gets rolling and the subsidies start flowing that repealing the law will be impossible. In fact, that’s become conventional wisdom.

We want to stop Obamacare not because we think anyone will like it, but because it won’t work, and in not working it will hurt the people it was ostensibly designed to help.

As Dan Perrin of the HSA Coalition says,

The subsidies are not heroin-like. For the healthy, the subsidies are more like nails on a chalk board, itching powder, or a month-by-month financial pain inflicting mandate forcing millions of Americans to buy a product they have already decided not to buy, or in other cases, forcing Americans to buy a more expensive version of something they already have, building resentment and anger over time, among both those who choose not to comply, and among those who choose to comply

Health insurance, like all insurance, is a substitute for wealth. People and companies who have enough money to fund their health care needs can simply pay cash and be “self-insured.” By paying for health insurance, we simulate this ability.

But health insurance has two major malfunctions: it siphons off money to dedicate to a particular budget category, and it returns less to us, over time, than we put in. We lose not only the use of our money, but the time value of it — the compound interest. Rather than getting investment return on our savings, we fund the profits of an insurance company.

Obamacare makes this even worse by mandating that we are covered for things we can’t possibly need. That raises the price of the insurance even more. 

Obamacare admits the inefficiency of insurance, by mandating that insurance companies spend 80% of our premiums on health care-related payouts, rather than on overhead and profit. But that means 20% of our health insurance premiums are simply wasted, as far as we are concerned.

Suppose I offered you an investment: For every $100 you invest, you can have $80 back, but only if you spend it on medical care, and only if you spend it with the limited number of doctors and hospitals I give you.  That isn’t $180, but $80. You would lose money.

Rather, people struggling to make ends meet need to save their money, first to have a cushion, so bills aren’t always paid late. Over 25% of all Americans don’t have that, and 74% have less than 6 months of savings. People need to save for car repairs, for other monthly emergencies (such as minor medical expenses), or for a down payment on a car or home of their own.

I’d rather be wrong about Obamacare. I’d rather the exchanges increase competition, driving down costs for health insurance while everyone gets health care for themselves, their many healthy self-actualized children, and their family unicorns.

But for every “Judy from Southern Illinois” that Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) brags will be able to go on the dehumanizing Medicaid, there will be two Joes from Northern Illinois who will be ordered to pay $100/month to get, on average, $80 worth of care. Not Judy nor either of the Joes will actually be helped in any way other than the warm feeling of having taken part in a leftist Senator’s talking point.

In the Wall Street Journal,  Daniel Henninger suggests that we stand aside and let Obamacare collapse:

Republicans and conservatives, instead of tilting at the defunding windmill, should be working now to present the American people with the policy ideas that will emerge inevitably when ObamaCare’s declines. The system of private insurance exchanges being adopted by the likes of Walgreens suggests a parallel alternative to ObamaCare may be happening already.

However, we must continue to fight tooth and nail over this, and not allow the idea that we should let Americans “get what they deserve” to take hold. 

Opponents of Obamacare have seen this coming. We are risking everything to defeat it, not because we thought it would work, but because we know it won’t.