Fire Up The Lowlights

Real Clear Politics's Robert Tracinski goes into meltdown mode over Obamacare, rattling off all the GOP talking points in an impressive storm of puffery and fallacies that just begs to be knocked down.

Our hero, bravely defending America's precious health insurers (our national treasure), starts off with a classic:

Three provisions constitute the vicious heart of the Democrats' health-care overhaul.
The first is "guaranteed issue" and "community rating." This is the requirement that insurance companies have to offer coverage to people who are already sick, and that they be limited in their ability to charge higher rates for customer who pose a higher risk. The extra expense to the insurance companies of covering people with pre-existing conditions will get passed on to existing customers in the form of higher premiums. But why spend years paying these inflated premiums for insurance you're not using, when you can get exactly the same benefits by waiting until you actually fall ill? The obvious result is that million of people, especially healthy young people, will quickly realize that there is no reason to buy health insurance until they get sick.

Rather than increasing the number of insured by making health insurance more affordable, this bill makes health insurance more expensive and increases the incentive to simply drop your insurance until you need someone to pay for your medical bills. It is an attempt to turn health insurance into what the left really wants: another welfare program in which everyone is entitled to free benefits, mandated by the government. But this would wreck private health insurance, making the whole industrial financially unsustainable.

Yes, imagine that.  Health insurance companies having to pay for sick people means they make less money.  Better to let sick people die because they can't afford care at all, or go into emergency rooms and receive health care that is the most expensive to administer, or go into medical bankruptcy because their insurance company doesn't cover enough than to threaten insurance company profits, however.  Certainly those outcomes aren't driving up health care costs for the rest of us, right?
(More after the jump...)

But let's go to his next point, the argument that people won't buy insurance until after they get sick under the new rules.  That does lead us to mandates to purchase insurance, the same reason why states mandate auto insurance for cars.  Nope, mandates too are evil.

Following the usual pattern of government intervention, the health-care bill offers another intervention as the solution for the problem created by the first. The "individual mandate" requires everyone to buy health insurance and subjects us to a tax if we fail to do so. But this is an especially onerous new tax, the first tax not tied to any kind of income or activity. It's not a tax on stock-market profits, say, or a tax on buying cigarettes. It's just a tax for existing.

So fearing a public backlash, Congress didn't have the guts to make this new tax very large-only $750. Yet actual insurance can cost more than $3,000 per year-and as we shall see, this legislation goes out of its way to drive up those rates by mandating more lavish coverage. So we end up getting the worst of both worlds. This provision won't actually drive anyone to buy health insurance and prop up the risk pools for those who are insured. All it will accomplish is to create a brand new form of tax.

Wait, so the problem is there's not enough money to cover the expansion of health insurance to sick people because there's not enough money going into the system, but actually paying for it is also unacceptable. (Fiscal responsibility for the win?)  And going back to the auto insurance analogy, plenty of people buy low-cost insurance to remain within legal guidelines.  But then he trashes that, too.

But the biggest power-grab in the bill is the government takeover of the entire market for health insurance. The bill requires all new policies to be sold on a government-controlled exchange run by a commissioner who is empowered to dictate what kinds of insurance policies can be offered, what they must cover, and what they can charge.

That's funny, states have that now...they are called state insurance commissions.  They regulate who can sell plans and for how much.  Amazing how that works.

Right now, your best option for reducing the cost of your health insurance is to buy a policy with a high deductible, which leaves you to pay for routine checkups and minor injuries (preferably from savings held in a tax-free Health Savings Account) but which covers your needs in catastrophic circumstances-a bad car accident, say, or expensive treatment for cancer. This is the kind of coverage I have.

But the health-insurance exchange is intended to eliminate precisely this kind of low-cost catastrophic coverage. Its purpose is to force health-insurance companies to offer comprehensive coverage that pays for all of your routine bills-which in turn comes at a higher price. So under the guise of making health insurance more affordable, this bill will restrict your menu of choices to include only the most expensive options.

Now he's just making stuff up.   There's nothing in the bills that force the level of coverage to be comprehensive for all policies...only that you can't be denied coverage.  In fact, the whole point is to get people to buy insurance...and aren't we forgetting about those subsidies?

So there we have the real essence of this bill. It restricts our choice of which insurance to buy and pushes us into more expensive plans. At the same time, it destroys the economic incentive to purchase insurance in the first place and replaces insurance with a free-floating tax on one's very existence.

By all means, let's debate some of that in the Senate.

Well, if the Senate is debating guys like this, even they should be able to win.  Not that hard, apparently.