Two old wolves and a young sheep go out to dinner. What’s on the menu?
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. Obamacare, should have the younger members of the country up in arms with its sneaky, intergenerational theft provision. Once again, the youth, at the discretion of the old, are served up to pay for the past mistakes of the previous generation’s shortcomings. This policy goes beyond the normal rich vs. poor debates to the very heart of how the current government views its citizens. For many, the concept of individual sovereignty is trumped by the socialist (Progressive) axiom that, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. Guess who the “few” are in that sentence — young people.
A number of years ago we had a debate in the country over the use of the draft as a means of keeping an active and viable military force. In today’s volunteer system it is evident that the quality and capacity has not been impaired since we left this outdated notion behind back in 1973. In fact, it could be said that there has never been a higher-caliber force in the nation’s history than there is today.
It was argued back then that compulsory service was good for the youth, that it would “build character.” Young men across the nation needed the “discipline” only the armed forces could provide. That it would make them “better citizens” was spoken in government meetings, rather than promoting the notion of freedom and the role of a citizen. The Utopian thinkers tried to divert the focus of the debate from its stated purpose of improving national security into a social engineering justification for forcing young men across the nation to surrender their liberty and become property of the state.
Thank God we saw through this draft propaganda for what it really was, an institutional slavery program whereby the government could lay claim on your life and liberty to suit its own purpose. As we have seen in the past, just wars have never run into the problem of lacking young men willing to sacrifice their lives for what they perceived as a just cause. In fact, during WW2 they had to turn away the underage enlistees. The problem always arises when armchair politicians (usually manipulated by special interests) were in need of young men to advance their political and business agendas, rather than national security matters, with WW1 and Vietnam being prime examples. The situation we face today is not all that different — where the old are once again calling for sacrifice by forcing the youth of the nation to pay up for their own failure to prepare. Instead of having them pick up rifles, they want the youth to man the bedpans.
In order for this new scheme to work, Obamacare relies on robbing the young of their ability to start a future. Latest projections from the government’s own estimates are that it will not work unless at least three million currently uninsured Americans, ages 18-34, enroll to subsidize the older and sicker. That sort of thinking is comparable to forcing the good drivers to pay for the bad drivers. In a true insurance pool, you pay based on your risk level. This government solution, however, is actually just another redistribution program wrapped up in pretty-sounding words like “shared sacrifice” and “saving money”. The real question is, “Who’s really sacrificing and who’s really saving money?”
Any system whose participants do not directly benefit or are directly penalized by its actions is always prone to breaking down under the realities of the real world. The youth who are already delaying marriage and children are doing so because they are living under crushing student loans, poor job prospects, and mounting future debt obligations from previous generations. Adding insult to injury, they are now being asked to sacrifice even more by paying for their predecessors’ poor lifelong health decisions.
Now, this is not to say that these same youth are being greedy and want to kick grandma out onto the street, but objectively speaking, we have created a system that continues to reward the old at the expense of the young. Poor health choices people have made are responsible for the majority of spiraling health costs in this country. It is not the random childhood cancer victim, but rather the 300-lb., chain-smoking butter-lover, who would rather lounge on the sofa watching another episode of The Biggest Loser than go for a daily 30-minute walk, that is driving these spiraling annual increases.
Our nation of achievers also has an abundance of those who refuse to take responsibility for their health and want a healthcare bailout (enter Obamacare), with the youth picking up the tab. When confronted with the costs of largely preventable Type 2 diabetes running at over $245 billion, you can be sure that this program will metastasize. It will become another federal cancer, expanding and infiltrating every nook and cranny it can, robbing the citizenry of both liberty and freedom. Banning sodas is just the beginning.
I could go on and on ad nauseam about the best solution being the individual medical savings accounts–where the population pays for the vast majority of their care by directly writing a check from their personal tax deductable accounts. This thereby removes the insurance middleman and allows the invisible hand of the market to once again assert itself and find the true middle ground of price discovery between healthcare provider and patient. Consequently, it would save billions of dollars in bloated waste and root out corruption. But then, where would that leave insurance companies? And therein lies the hidden truth behind this problem. The solution to our problems would actually DECIMATE the insurance and pharmaceutical industries! This is why our “most transparent administration in history” had to “pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” behind closed doors and not on C-SPAN as promised. Eat the young to save the old.
Five years from now, when economists are wondering why we have become a nation of renters, with shrinking savings and children still living at home, we can look back on the implementation of the Unaffordable Care Act as another nail in the coffin of the American Dream. No economy can hope to grow when it’s destroying its youth under the shackles of the previous generation’s mistakes. I once said that the future will not be Republicans vs. Democrats, but will more likely reflect the worker/young (the bill payer) vs. retiree/old (the receiver) dynamic. Obamacare only brings my prediction that much closer to a reality.