Obama's Public Sector Full Employment Plan
By Ann Coulter
AnnCoulter.com
Last week, President Obama said "the private
sector is doing fine." This was not reassuring
to those of us who suspect the Democrats haven't
the first idea what "private sector" means.
He did not help matters by becoming lachrymose
over the suffering of public sector employees:
"Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy
have to do with state and local government. ...
And so, if Republicans want to be helpful, if
they really want to move forward and put people
back to work, what they should be thinking about
is, how do we help state and local governments
..."
When Democrats say the public sector is
suffering, they mean public sector employees
have half the unemployment rate of the rest of
the country -- 4.2 percent compared to 8.2
percent.
Obama's monumentally idiotic statement has led
his media defenders to recycle Mitt Romney's
alleged "gaffe" from several months ago, when he
said: "I like being able to fire people who
provide services to me."
But that was not a gaffe at all -- except as
deceptively edited by the media to end after the
word "people." (Only Donald Trump enjoys firing
people, and by the way, people love watching
Donald Trump fire people.)
Far from a gaffe, Romney's actual sentence is
the key to understanding the nation's health
care crisis -- which happens to be exactly what
he was talking about.
Nearly every product you can think of has gotten
better and cheaper in the last 20 years because
of market competition: cell phones, television
sets, computers, food delivery, airline tickets
(constrained by the cost of fuel), express mail,
and on and on.
There aren't a lot of restaurants serving lousy
food or dog walkers who lose your dog because
they'd go out of business pretty fast if they
provided rotten services. They're not the only
game in town.
But you know what is the only game in town? The
government, including putatively private
businesses that are heavily regulated by the
government. Only with the government do we
continuously get worse service for a higher
price.
Take away the ability to fire people, and you
have airport security, public schools, Veterans
Administration hospitals, the Postal Service,
General Motors and Pinch Sulzberger, New York
Times family scion.
Health insurers may technically be private
companies, but they are required by law to cover
a slew of services, making them an extension of
monopolistic government. (Similarly, the old
AT&T was a "private" company, but in reality it
was just a government-run monopolistic phone
company providing no choice, poor service,
little innovation and obscenely high prices.)
In most states, you can't choose a health
insurance plan that doesn't cover gambling and
sex addictions, psychological counseling, speech
therapy and prenatal care -- even if you plan on
never having children.
Health insurance companies don't need to compete
for your business -- they're all offering the
same product, anyway. Moreover, because of
government regulation concerning how health
insurance is taxed, most people aren't choosing
their insurers. Their employers are.
As a result, insurance companies have become
outrageously unresponsive to both patients and
doctors. Insurance companies need only concern
themselves with satisfying government regulators
and corporate purchasers. Meanwhile, doctors
have to please only the insurance companies,
which don't particularly care how patients are
treated, as long as it's cheap.
This is a third-party-payer problem, or as the
proverb goes, "He who pays the piper calls the
tune." All third-party-payer systems are
disasters. The customer is trapped, forced to
pay for something he doesn't want, with no one
to complain to and no possibility of taking his
business elsewhere.
An example frequent travelers will recognize are
the online discount hotel brokers. These can be
great -- unless you arrive at a hotel and
there's no WiFi, or there's massive construction
going on, or your room isn't available until
four hours after check-in time. But you've
already paid the full price to the booking
company.
If you had paid for the room yourself, you could
walk away and find another hotel. (Even if you
used a credit card, you can reverse the charges
because, again, credit card companies would go
out of business if they didn't refuse payment
for scams.) But if you booked through a third
party, the hotel tells you, "Sorry, take it up
with Expedia."
Ironically, Romney is proposing that all
Americans have the same ability he has to hire
and fire insurance companies and doctors. The
rich already can do this. Why can't the rest of
us? We hire -- and fire -- our own appliance
stores, pet groomers, restaurants, hairdressers
and computer companies. Why not health
providers?
And why are the media so desperate to avoid that
conversation?
We need a free market in health insurance, which
Congress could accomplish with a one-page bill
stating, "There shall be interstate commerce in
health insurance." Once we were allowed to
purchase health insurance across states lines --
prohibited by law today -- everyone would be
buying insurance from companies based in states
such as Utah, which have the fewest mandates
about what health insurers must cover.
Insurance companies would be responsive to us,
the people buying their services, and not the
government or corporations. Most people would
choose to buy insurance only for what insurance
is intended for -- catastrophes -- while paying
for regular checkups themselves, the same way we
pay for our own cell phones, computers, baby
sitters, manicures and everything else that's
been getting better and cheaper, unlike all
government-regulated services.
Doctors would then have to be responsive to us,
not to our insurance companies. Nothing improves
the quality of a service like being able to fire
the people providing it. The media don't want
you to think about that, so they edit Romney's
remark and call it a "gaffe."
For better service right now, for example, the
American people need to fire Barack Obama and
hire Mitt Romney.
COPYRIGHT 2012 ANN COULTER
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