Bloomberg News: The Obama administration promised a ‘tech surge’ to fix its online health-insurance market, in a blog post that said the website ‘has not lived up to the expectations of the American people.’
‘Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve healthcare.gov,’ according to the unsigned post, which went up today on the website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ‘We’re also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of healthcare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site.’
Surprise, surprise. Socialism does not work. Who knew? Obamacare is an experiment in socialism—a government-engineered ‘marketplace.’
It cannot work because it’s bad in theory and has wrong intentions.
Good theory, and good intentions, would leave people free and self-responsible for purchasing health care and health insurance in the private marketplace. Good policy would have been to reform health care by liberalizing, deregulating and opening up the marketplace, not intensifying government’s stranglehold on it.
Private companies, in a deregulated marketplace, would compete for customers seeking to purchase their products and services. These products and services might include health insurance, or might include actual medical care.
Private companies and individuals are accountable. They cannot make one penny in profit unless people willingly pay for their goods or services.
Obamacare is coercive. Obamacare mandates that people must buy the product. Right there, accountability is out the window. If people are required to get this product or pay a fine/go to jail, then what incentive do companies or organizations have to persuade people to buy what they offer?
Imagine if the federal government passed a law that everyone is now required to buy smart phones. In order to help those who cannot afford smart phones pay for them, the government will set up a website filled with opportunities to get those phones cheap, or for free. It would be called, ‘Smartphone.gov.’
What do you think would happen to accountability with the private, for-profit companies who presently sell these phones to willing customers? They know they’re going to have customers no matter what. It’s a government requirement.
How efficient do you think the federal government would be at creating this federally-engineered marketplace for cell phones?
We have to get over this idea that socialism has good intentions, and only lacks practicality. We have to let go of the idea that Obama is simply the latest in a long line of inept socialist leaders, and if we just find the right leader—well then, we’ll be on our way.
Socialism by its very nature removes accountability, self-responsibility and rational human choice from the equation. Removing these things is always bad and wrong. Whenever human beings set out to do something bad or wrong in theory, it ends up faltering or collapsing in practice.
Why in the world do people expect a government-manufactured ‘marketplace’ in health care to perform any better than a government-manufactured marketplace in restaurants, computers or automobiles?
The only explanations I can find are fear and ignorance. Obama has made a two-term presidency out of cashing in on these two things.
Despite the widespread problems, the White House has yet to fully explain what went wrong with the online system consumers were supposed to use to sign up for coverage.
Accountability is not part of socialism. Socialism refers to a government monopoly. Government has taken over health care, and when government screws it up—well, there’s no firing or replacing the government, is there?
Some news reports refer to the Obamacare debacle as a political ‘black eye’ for Obama.
If you ask me, it’s not an embarrassment for Obama so much as for the majority of Americans who allowed or encouraged this to happen in the first place.
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