Monday, July 15, 2013

U.S. House Resolution 2668: Delay Obamacare

U.S. House Resolution 2668 is a humble little thing:

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/113/hr2668

You may have to click on a tab or button to see the "Bill Text" in PDF format. All the bill text says is that, if this bill becomes law, the requirements that individuals buy into medical insurance schemes will be delayed by another year.

This bill will be well worth passing...provided that we use the next year to draft an ethically acceptable, economically sustainable alternative to Obamacare.

Republicans, please don't say "People should pay for their own medical care, or at least their own medical insurance." There is a real popular mandate for the U.S. federal budget to provide some sort of safety-net scheme for medical care. Maybe there shouldn't be one, but there is. The question is how to make sure everyone who really needs help can get help to pay for needed medical care, without wasting money on high-stakes gambling schemes or on fads ("Everybody should take this pill or that test because my nephew has invented it"). The Veterans Administration has been doing this for years; there's no reason why it can't be done on a nationwide scale.

Democrats, please don't say "People should be willing to pay for Obamacare as a tax." Obamacare has not been set up as a legitimate tax. It was designed to transfer massive amounts of money from workers to gamblers. It's not ethically acceptable, and people like me aren't going along with it.

When people seriously investigate what's caused medical care to become so expensive in recent years, what they find is not that the majority of people need extremely new and expensive treatments (they don't) but that the insurance system has inflated the costs and prevented doctors from doing pro bono work. (There's a chapter on this in Glenn Beck's Broke and another extensive discussion of this topic in Ben Carson's America the Beautiful; both books are recommended.)

We need a medical care scheme that everybody can understand before it's rushed through the legal system, that pays for necessary medical care and nothing more and nothing less. And if realizing what a disaster Obamacare would be, and delaying it (for another year, and as many more years as may be necessary), is what we need to work out a viable alternative to Obamacare, then let's get on with it.

Support U.S. HR2668, please. Then let's get cracking on the alternative.

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