"HEALTHCARE, HEALTH INSURANCE AND HOW TO FIX THEM" ***WARNING: LOGIC AND COMMON SENSE FOLLOWS

Below are follow-up comments by Barnhardt on a few points that weren't covered in the videos. You can read the entire follow-up at her site--post titled ON OBAMACARE AND THE CHURCH. No permalinks at her site so just scroll down to the post.

**This is a follow-up to the Healthcare videos posted yesterday. I have a couple of quick secular points, and then I want to explain the reason why there are so many Catholic bishops jumping in bed with the Marxist abomination of state-controlled healthcare.

1. I have received many great reader comments on insurance. The first great point that I wasn’t able to address in my video was the point of “pre-existing conditions”. It goes without saying that the entire paradigm of insurance and risk pooling utterly disintegrates – and that is the PERFECT word for it: dis-integrates – if insurance providers are forced to accept enrollees with pre-existing conditions. If the risk in question is already fully manifest as a catastrophe, the insurance company is no longer acting as a risk pooler – it is being forced to act as a charity. Insurance companies are not charities. Charities are charities. Trying to force a for-profit risk pooler to be a charity will accomplish nothing except destroying the company and the risk-pooling paradigm itself. This is simple logic and common sense. Anyone who argues to the contrary is either mentally disabled in some way, or evil. One, two. There is no three.

2. Yes, neither the government nor employers should have ANYHING to do with health insurance. Whether or not to buy health insurance and which insurance to buy should be completely up to the individual. Employers don’t involve themselves in what clothes people buy, what food they buy or what dwelling they rent or buy. Why in the world would health insurance be any different? Oh, and portability would cease to be an issue if employer-sponsored health insurance was eliminated.

3. Fraud. Yep, the massive problem of insurance fraud would also be reduced if deductibles were raised and people were forced back into the healthcare market. I received a message from a reader with a nurse in their family who reports that a single alcohol wipe is billed at $5.00 to insurance companies/MediCare. The actual cost? $0.04. If individuals were receiving itemized bills and having to pay for this stuff themselves, how long do you think it would take for the price of a single alcohol wipe to deflate from $5.00 to $0.06? I’m not sure, but that speed would have to be expressed as a percentage of the speed of light, methinks.