Obamacare may not be good for US’ health

The US Supreme Court will rule on the fate of Barack Obama’s healthcare law next month. While the unpopular law falls short of nationalising the healthcare sector, it mandates the compulsory purchase of health insurance policies and contains rules designed to destroy the insurance industry, thus providing an excuse for the government to take over the healthcare sector.

One rule turns the meaning of insurance upside down and requires insurance companies to not only cover the costs of unforeseen events but also bear certain regular expenses that exceed the insurance premium.

The Supreme Court ruling will have important ramifications as a major tenet of socialists could be ruled illegitimate. That the court can overturn a law passed by the legislative branch has left much of Europe bewildered, but unlike India and the European countries, the US is more of a republic than a democracy.

As a nation of laws rather than a nation of people, it limits the powers of the government and puts the rule of law above the tyranny of the majority.
During the hearing of the arguments on the healthcare law, one of the judges asked if the government could go beyond forcing people to purchase insurance policies and force them to purchase broccoli. Such questioning indicates that the court may be inclined towards overturning the law.

If the law is struck down, it will not be the first time that the US Supreme Court guts socialist policies. In the 1930s, the American economy was in a depression and it took off only after the Supreme Court overturned many provisions of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ policies which imposed controls such as price-fixing.

The experience of India too shows that the removal of socialist policies leads to marked improvements in the system. During the socialist era, most of India lacked access to proper healthcare while its politicians went to Western countries for treatment.
After the liberalisation of the economy, cheap and good quality care is now available in private sector hospitals that have sprung up around the country and even politicians including Manmohan Singh get treated within the country.

Indian private sector hospitals have also become magnets for British and Canadian patients whose broken nationalised systems deprive them of access to timely surgeries and instead place them on waiting lists for several years.

The Indian education system too has a few lessons for the world as its medical colleges keep the cost of education under control by focusing on medical degrees at the undergraduate level.
The American system lacks undergraduate degrees in medicine and students waste a significant portion of their time attending classes on frivolous topics in humanities departments resulting in the high cost of producing doctors.

Despite the propaganda by socialists about the alleged superiority of socialist systems over the American healthcare system, it is politicians from socialist countries who seek treatment in the US.

Recently, the premier of the Canadian province of Newfoundland flew to Florida for his heart surgery after he discovered that the Canadian system was not good enough for him.

Within the US, pharmaceutical firms which sense an opportunity to regularly sell drugs to the government at arbitrarily high prices support the nationalisation of the healthcare sector thus highlighting the fact that socialism and crony-capitalism go hand in hand. Today, the most expensive drugs are those that enjoy government protection and are listed as prescription drugs. It is common for the price of these drugs to dramatically fall by as much as ninety percent when they are recategorized as over-the-counter drugs and face competition in the marketplace.

The destruction of the American healthcare system is part of the agenda of the socialists who form a core segment of Obama’s Democratic Party. Western socialists view themselves as the removers of suffering through ruling over others and believe that they bear what Rudyard Kipling described as the “White man’s burden” of civilising the “half-savage races” of the world.

In the absence of suffering or victims, they create misery and victims so that they can appoint themselves the saviors and position themselves at the top of the power structure.

If the healthcare law is not overturned by the court, India could see an influx of American patients who become victims of healthcare rationing and end up on waiting lists for surgeries, but India still stands to lose as the whole world will be in peril with the only major country that has resisted socialism finally falling to the socialists.

 The author can be reached at arvind@classical-liberal.net
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