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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Just like Social Security, the new Obama-care scam amounts to a federal Ponzi scheme wealth-transfer from the young and poor to the old and affluent

Right-Wing Obamacare
(The American Conservative blog) -- by Daniel McCarthy --

Whether it’s called Obamacare or Romneycare, and whether it’s right-wing or left-wing, the further cartelization of the healthcare system is a very bad idea. In exchange for extending coverage to high-risk individuals, the insurance industry is promised guaranteed profits from a consumer base — that is, people like you and me — that is legally compelled to purchase its product. As with any massively centralized compulsory system, no one can know how it will all work out: perhaps the insurance companies really will lose money in the end. But as we move further away from a free market, the usual kinds of competitive pressures that keep costs down and quality high will be further attenuated; the only sure losers here are the consumers.

Although it doesn’t matter whether a bad idea is right-wing or left-wing, it might as well be pointed out that Obamacare has a great deal in common not only with what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts but also with what George W. Bush wanted to do with the Social Security system. Remember how Social Security “privatization” was supposed to work: it was not a just chance to opt our of a federal Ponzi scheme that transfers wealth from the young and poor to the old and affluent — which is what Social Security does — but rather Bush’s plan offered as the alternative to having all of your payroll taxes go to Social Security the prospect of having a small percentage of those taxes go into a “private” (but of course, government-approved) retirement fund. In short, it was a choice between an old-fashioned wealth transfer and a newfangled forced-savings scheme, one that would have involved the same cartelization risks as Obamacare does.

Just as Obama and the Democratic Congress are forcing Americans to buy insurance, Bush and the Republican Congress were going to force people to buy into retirement funds if they partly exited Social Security. No wonder, then, that the GOP has put up such feeble resistance against the individual health-insurance mandate: for 20-odd years the putatively free-market Right has wanted the federal government to compel individual citizens to buy another kind of product. The roots of Obamacare are not to be found among Marx, Lenin, or the European Left, but with Bismarck, Milton Friedman, and the state-capitalist Right...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

Why am I NOT surprised that it is the Baby Boomer generation of leadership that is engineering this latest scam? As ever, they're doing nothing but take, take, take their entire way through the system. I guess they’ve calculated they'll be dead by the time the country finally collapses, but in the mean time, ensure themselves health care. However, given the increased life-span of the average person, maybe upon national bankruptcy they'll just end up getting wheeled from their nursing homes and dumped onto the street or a snow bank.

Sad, although at that point it will be hard to argue against the mob that that's not exactly what they deserve.

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