The Victimization of Cinfici by Obamacare

           In my last post, I reported the enactment of a law to prevent the federalization of health insurance, also known as “Obamacare,” to prevent small businesses from not being able to continue to offer their employees the choice of low-premium, high-deductible health insurance plans that make them eligible for tax-advantaged health savings accounts.  Since then, like many other Americans who were satisfied with their health insurance policies, I coincidentally learned that my own high-deductible health insurance policy will be cancelled because of the federal health insurance takeover, despite President Barack Obama’s false claim during his campaign for Obamacare that the insured who liked their current insurance plans could keep them.

            Because of the federalization of health insurance that was passed by a liberal Democratic Congress and signed into law by Obama in 2009, my deductible will increase over 25%, while my premium will increase more than 125%!  In return, I am now eligible for a series of benefits I mostly cannot use, such as for women’s or children’s health care.  The few preventive care benefits for which I am now eligible, for which I would have continued willingly to pay out of my pocket, are worth less in terms of financial cost than the increase in cumulative premiums, in addition to the increased annual deductibles. 

I also now see firsthand how the insured are treated more equally under the federalization of health insurance, which means there is less reward for healthy behavior than before, as the law eliminates insurance underwriting.  Thus, the insured’s insurance rates are less based upon their individual risk profiles, including their own lifestyles, but are is designed primarily as public welfare for those who are unable or unwilling to pay for their own health care and for those who are too ill to insure, as insurance is intended as a pooling of risk, ideally among those with similar risk profiles, not as a subsidy those who already require funds.  The federal health insurance takeover has thereby reduced freedom by reducing choice.  As those who do not need insurance because they can afford their own health care are being forced to acquire it in order to subsidize others, the choices of those of us who desire insurance plans to fit our individual situations are now limited.  Moreover, it appears that those individuals who were responsible to pay for their own health care or for insurance only for relatively catastrophic illnesses or injuries, are being punished by the federal government as if we did something wrong, in order to aid those who were too irresponsible to pay for their own health care.  Health insurance is not a federal issue, nor even a proper general concern for any government, but if it were, government ought to reward responsibility, not to punish it and reward irresponsibility.

The theoretical liberal premise of the federalization of health insurance is that, for financial cost controls and improving health, the focus of health care should be on those who are healthy in order to screen or prevent disease, instead of the treatment of those who are ill.  Therefore, the law removes the financial disincentives for preventive care.  This theory remains unproven, as there are numerous concerns, such as the increased risk to healthy people going to health care centers full of patients infected with various contagious diseases, and the financial waste and counter-productiveness toward the goal of improving health of spending (rationed) health care resources on the healthy, at the expense of the ill.  I submit how unnecessary it is to provide financial incentives for reasonable people to receive certain preventive care screenings or procedures they already receive regularly, even at their own expense.  In other words, government – in this case, the federal government – assumes that people would not act reasonably for the sake of their health because of financial reasons, and decides to force them to make what it considers to be decisions in the best interest of their health.  The federal government’s assumption that people must be incentivized financially to act in their best interest is an offensive kind of prejudice, that people would necessarily place their financial self-interest above the vital interest. 

The federalization of health insurance is clearly the embodiment of numerous liberal policy goals that are based upon various errors: obsession with money and lack of understanding of self-interest, especially financial self-interest; distrust of financial liberty; redistribution of wealth by taking from those who earned it and giving it to those who did not; radical egalitarianism; opposition to the free market, especially private enterprise; and faith in large, centralized government, aversion to the principle of subsidiarity and contempt for the constitutional principal of federalism, all at the expense of the rights of States and the freedom of the people.