You Can’t Kill Obamacare With Compromise

Compromise is a perfectly nice idea when two parties want the same thing.

If two people want to eat dinner, they can negotiate or compromise on where. Chinese food tonight, Italian food tomorrow. If they both want to see a movie, they can compromise on the movie. If you both want a vacation by the sea, you can compromise on Hawaii, the Caribbean or the Jersey or California shore.

But if you want totally different things, compromise quickly falls apart. That’s the problem with the continuing Obamacare repeal debacle. Republicans — most of whom are liars — claim to want to repeal Obamacare. Democrats wish to retain and expand it. You cannot compromise. Yet compromise is precisely what Republicans have set out to do.

And they wonder why their bill cannot get off the ground.

The only rational reason for wanting to repeal Obamacare is because you want liberty and freedom in health care. Repealing Obamacare alone will not achieve that, but it’s a necessary first step. Liberty and freedom are the complete opposite of socialism. Obamacare stands for socialism. Repeal of Obamacare means liberty and freedom. You cannot compromise on this matter.

Consider the absurdity of repealing “preexisting conditions” in health insurance. Mandating that insurance companies cover people with preexisting conditions is not liberty. It’s a form of coercion which forces those who already paid for premiums — sometimes for years on end — to now endure higher premiums so those who didn’t buy health insurance in the past may get a free ride. So long as that mandate remains in any bill, there is no health insurance industry. It’s all insurance delivered by government mandates, which is always expensive and is never sustainable.

That’s one of the reasons America is so divided. About half the country wants some form of socialism, especially in health care, and the other half does not. You’re never going to reconcile these two things. It would have been like trying to reconcile the royal monarchy of Great Britain and the United States colonies at the time of the American Revolution. Actually, the differences at that time were less severe than the differences between liberty and socialism. Our differences today more closely resemble those that brought about America’s Civil War. The basic choice back then was between liberty for all versus slavery. Socialism is an economic form of slavery where those who produce are forced to carry the load for those who cannot or will not produce anything. You cannot reconcile liberty and socialism.

It’s the same today with health care. Although many Republicans in Congress do not want liberty, most of the people who put them in office do. The Democrats in Congress and most of the people who voted for them want socialism, at least in medicine. They’d pass single-payer Communism in health care tomorrow if they could — and will do so the next time they control all branches of government, I promise.

The only way to kill Obamacare is to uphold freedom, free markets, liberty and individual rights in health care. Those are the only reasons for wanting to kill Obamacare. Compromise will deliver more victories to the proponents of socialism. Because when Obamcare-lite goes down in flames, as it will, then free markets and capitalism — not Obamacare and socialism — will get all the blame.