The Obamacare employer mandate has become a political quagmire for many liberals, who are starting to agree that penalizing business for refusing to offer health insurance is a part of the president’s healthcare reform plan that should be abandoned.
“The issue really becomes, ‘Do we need it or do we not need it?'” health policy expert Chris Jennings told Politico, saying the issue had become a “political irritant.” [Source: Politico.com and Newsmax.com]
Actually, the mandate IS Obamacare. Government force is precisely what this law, and all laws like it, are all about. Without coercion, there would be no law. If coercion were not deemed necessary, there never would have been an Obamacare law in the first place.
You’ve heard the phrase, “the rubber meets the road.” Here’s the equivalent: The politician meets reality.
In order to cope and survive in reality, human beings must think. Either you think for yourself, or you let someone else think for you. Wherever there’s survival, somebody’s thinking has enabled it. Survival does not happen by accident, by magic — or a legislator’s pen, a dictator’s edict.
This is an objective, unarguable fact. Even if we passed a law stating that the government will provide everything – not just medical care, but absolutely everything – somebody would have to think and ensure those goods and services are provided.
Generally speaking, laws requiring goods and services be provided by force don’t turn out very well. All-out Communist states like Soviet Russia, North Korea and Cuba never produced very much outside of misery, starvation and mass murder. We’re told – especially by conservatives – that it’s because these systems go against human nature. The implication is that “if man were selfless and noble, these systems would work; man isn’t selfless and noble, so you have to be realistic.”
No, that’s not it.
The reason these systems don’t work is because man, in order to survive, must think, and act self-responsibly as the result of that thinking (paying the price for errors, and correcting them, as necessary). In a free society where all productive, creative and scientific human enterprise is left free from government force, the maximum amount of rational and logical, productive behavior possible is enabled. While a state of freedom is no guarantee that human beings will think, there’s no possibility of human beings thinking without that freedom.
That’s why Communist or equivalent systems never work, and never will work. They go against human nature’s primary moral and practical requirement: The capacity to think.
In a complex, technological and division-of-labor society such as our own, thinking involves a combination of reasoning for oneself and relying on the thinking of others in their own areas of specialty. In other words, there’s a lot of thinking to be done, and everyone is left to their own area of specialization and expertise. This makes the requirement of a free market even more desperately important, if anything. The more government interferes with the natural course of human thought and division of labor, the more it messes it up.
Obamacare, in principle, is no different from Communism or any other form of anti-human, anti-thinking policy, in practice. Obamacare limits its Communist principles to the area of health care, rather than to the entire society, as Soviet-style or Cuban-style Communism does. But in practice it has to work out the same.
The cries of regret and remorse are now being heard from Democratic politicians, as they confront the reality of what they’ve done. Hillary Clinton questioned the wisdom of the mandate back in April. Hillary Clinton? Has the woman who came up with the precursor to Obamacare back in 1994 — a maze of mandates itself — turned into a Reagan conservative, all of a sudden? I don’t think so.
You can be sure the Obamacare mandate isn’t going anywhere. For one thing, the governmental wheels are already in motion. For another, Obama couldn’t care less about what the majority thinks, even if a majority don’t want the mandate. When he believes he’s right, that’s the end of it. We know that from his attitudes and actions every single day of the last 5 and a half years. If facts don’t get in his way, a majority of Americans won’t either, especially since he’s not facing reelection.
Most likely, the Democratic politicians feigning dislike of the mandate –the same people who supported it just months and years earlier – are simply posturing for the next election. Republicans do the same thing, when they claim to be against expansive government but then do nothing about it, once in office.
Even the White House has labeled the mandate as “not critical,” when delaying it twice in the past year, and now plans to slowly phase in the mandate, which states that businesses that have more than 50 full-time workers must offer them affordable insurance.
Amazing. Instead of lifting all controls on the private marketplace of health care and health insurance, the government has completely taken over the pricing, delivery and regulation of health care. Now they scream that employers “must provide affordable health care.” How? How are employers supposed to magically make health care cheap and affordable for everyone? There’s no marketplace for employers to get that affordable insurance; government now mandates and dictates the content of all policies, and through Medicare and Medicaid, it now mandates most of what doctors and hospitals may charge, and even how they practice.
If the government is so great, then why don’t they just order all health insurance policies to be affordable? (Oops; that’s what Obamacare tried to do.)
There’s no answer, other than more screams of hostility when you question anything the government attempts to do. To be fair, the government should not be criticized for being incapable of doing the impossible. At the same time, the government should be severely condemned for refusing to let private citizens be self-responsible and self-determining in a free marketplace for medicine.
If the marketplace won’t provide something the government thinks it should provide, then no government official — not even Barack Obama — can mandate, wish or order it into existence.
If you’re not happy with what the marketplace has been delivering, then maybe we should allow a private marketplace to function.
Are you learning anything from this experiment in medical Communism, America?
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