Its Not Competition When the Other Guy Has All the Guns

Barack Obama and his cheerleaders are promoting what they call a “public” option to promote more “competition” in the health care market. What they mean, of course, is a government option funded by taxpayers to naturally monopolize the health care market.

Despite the fact that most Americans are already happy with their health care, including the uninsured, the Democratic Party has convinced the nation that there’s a crisis of apocalyptic levels plaguing our nation's health care system. (There is a forthcoming crisis in health care, actually: it’s Medicare, and it’s not going to pay for itself. But I digress…) To fix this “crisis,” Barack Obama and his cheerleaders are promoting what they call a “public” option to promote more “competition” in the health care market. Sounds awfully capitalisty. Competition and choice and all that, after all. What they mean, of course, is a government option funded by taxpayers to naturally monopolize the health care market. It isn’t “competition” for one side to start out with unlimited resources and three hundred million donors to the kitty. Lest one be under the illusion that the government option is going to merely “compete” with the private sector, he need only glance at the education system. “Public” “schools” are merely “competing” with the private sector. That's "competition," too. Except that the entire nation is forced to buy stock in the "public" option, whether they want to or not. The inevitable result is obvious. And such is the essence of socialistic policies: everyone’s covered. Poorly. But it's like the radical leftist historian Howard Zinn has said about the Soviet Union's policies: hey, at least there was universal coverage, and at least there weren't billionaires. The quality of your health care might decrease and your freedom might contract, but at least you get to stick it to the man, America. Perhaps one day we’ll be "universally covered," just like Britain, and our government, too, will ban life-prolonging drugs when they’re deemed "too expensive." Or maybe private care will be made illegal, like in Canada. To be sure, our current system is riddled with a seemingly endless list of inefficiencies and problems. We spend more money per capita on health care than any other nation on Earth, and yet seem to get results that don't live up to such exorbitant spending. We can get more for less -- but not by handing the system over to the federal government. It should be remembered that it is the private sector that created absolutely everything that the federal government is dangling over the heads of voters as goodies. Government cannot create. It can only seize and redistribute wealth that has already been produced. It isn't an accident that America produces far more new life-saving drugs than Europe on an annual basis. Are we really ready to slay the goose that lays the golden eggs? Absolutely no one can “compete” with a behemoth “public” option. The multi-trillion dollar federal government is better-funded than any other operation in the universe and can crush everything in its path -- just like it did to our schools. If you're itching for the quality of the nation's health care to be equal to the quality of our schools, then sign on to the Obama plan. But please, don't call it "competition."