No one at Bookworm Room is surprised that Obama doubled-down on health care

Many pundits opined that Obama, being a bright guy, would learn from his myriad failures in 2009.  Over here at Bookworm Room, however, I repeatedly said that Obama is the type of malignant narcissist who will never learn from experience.  Unlike a social narcissist — that would be Clinton — who desperately craves approval and will do anything, including sleeping with thousands of women and changing his whole political ideology, to get that approval, Obama is the kind of narcissist who looks around him and sees two classes of people:  (1) those who agree with him and (2) a whole bunch of idiots.  The only way to deal with the latter, of course, is to continue to bully, hector and try to control them.  The American people are getting the full court press of a malignant narcissist who has been crossed.

It’s not pretty:

President Barack Obama is putting forward a nearly $1 trillion, 10-year health care plan that would allow the government to deny or roll back egregious insurance premium increases that infuriated consumers.

It doesn’t seem to occur to the president that the best way to deal with health care plans that mess with prices is to open the marketplace so that insured people can turn their back on those companies.

In other words, Obama is bribing Americans:  I’ll fix prices, if you’ll buy a $1 trillion addition to the American debt load, and total federal control over your health care and, by extension, your lives.  Does he really think we’re that stupid?  Forget I asked that question.  As I said in my first paragraph, of course he does.

Thinking it through, the whole premium increase thing is an issue because there is really no true marketplace for health insurance.  Because of the fact that insurers, not individuals, buy insurance, so people are tied to their policies because of their jobs; and because of the pre-existing condition problem (which also ties people to jobs), insurers don’t have true marketplace competition.  Instead, on a state by state, and employer by employer basis, they have monopolies — which is why they can raise prices with impunity.

Severing insurance from employment, and treating it like auto or life or home insurance, is one way to increase market forces, thereby decreasing the impunity with which insurer’s manipulate prices.  To date, the more vexing question has been how to deal with pre-existing conditions, since it seems unfair to force an insurer voluntarily to take on someone who will manifestly cost more than any premiums he will provide.  I realized, however, when I sat down and thought about things, that this issue can be dealt with simply by stating that, if a person with a pre-existing condition is currently insured, and can find comparable insurance with another company, that second company must provide coverage.

In a huge, open market, no one insurance company is going to be terribly hurt by this.  In a truly competitive system, one in which individuals, not their employers, buy insurance; and where people can buy basic policies, instead of premium policies only; and one in which people can cross state lines to buy cheaper policies (and assume the risks of less regulation); and where there is infinitely less government paperwork; people’s freedom to move from one policy to another will help sooth the economic hurt of forcing any one company to take on a person with a pre-existing condition.  For example, if Steve, with colitis, leaves insurance company X for insurance company Y (because the latter offers him a better deal), you can pretty much bet that Sally, with disc problems, will leave insurance company Y for insurance company X, because she likes the latter’s coverage better. In other words, the whole pre-existing condition issue is a problem in significant part because there’s too much government involvement, making movement within the market impossible.  Insurance companies are just as trapped as consumers are.

I hope that people are not fooled, but are, instead, offended, by the way in which president Obama is selling mutton dressed as lamb.  This is not a better deal, despite the way in which Obama has built in yet another bribe.  It is the same old, same old:  government will officially take over health care; government will use the full weight of its punitive powers to force citizens to buy a third party product that they may neither need nor want; physicians will be bullied in a way no other private citizens are when it comes to the nature of their work; and our nation will collapse under a completely unnecessary debt load.