Healthcare.. The Final Word

The devil visited a lawyer's office and made him an offer. "I can arrange some things for you, " the devil said. "I'll increase your income five-fold. Your partners will love you; your clients will respect you; you'll have four months of vacation each year and live to be a hundred. All I require in return is that your wife's soul, your children's souls, and their children's souls rot in hell for eternity."

The lawyer thought for a moment. "What's the catch?" he asked.

I did a quick search and found 161 jokes about how slimey lawyers are. But then I've found millions of pages full of facts that prove those jokes to be right! So how is it that the vast majority of our current leaders are lawyers. Think about it, who would you rather take care of your home, family and finances.. a lawyer or a successfull businessman? But then the lawyers have you so afraid of lawsuits these days that you might have answered with "lawyer".

Therein lies the problem. This legal mafia has forced us to pay them to protect us from their wrath, not unlike the mobsters of long ago who would beat the shop owner into submission and offer him a chance to pay a percentage of his income (a tax if you will) for protection.

Our "healthcare problem" is no different. The simple fact is that we have the best healthcare system in the world, bar none! Our problem is in the cost of that care.. more to the point.. the cost of protection from lawyers that is imposed by lawyers which are facilitated by those lawyers that now run our once great country.

Since the logical place to start is at the beginning, and we are talking about government, we will start in the middle.

When you have a problem with your plumbing you call a plumber and he gives you a quote. You can compare that quote to others and find what you think to be the best service for the best price. These plumbers know this and are bound by the free market to keep price and service affordable so that they can stay in business. If a customer feels that his price was too high for the service he will fire that plumber, that is, never use him again. Plus he is likely to tell his friends and the plumber will likely lose his business. That's how our country was supposed to work.

Enter the scum sucking lawyer! The customer has had a problem that caused damage to his home. He retains a lawyer who offers him riches beyond his wildest dreams as a form of punishment towards the plumber. That plumber loses his business and the net result is the same as it would have been had the homeowner simply fired him. Now that may seem fair but wait.. what is the gross result?

Other plumbers are now faced with the reality that one single customer can destroy them should they make a single mistake. As a form of protection they reach out to an insurance company to help build a financial cushion to absorb the potential lawsuits. Insurance companies have to build a cushion as well. They have to build a "risk pool". This means that they must secure enough money from enough companies that are unlikely to be sued to balance out the risk of one that may.

The cost of this legal protection is now built in to the price, that is, we must pay for parts, labor and now protection. Once the lawyers realized how much money was in the insurance pot they started going for much more. It was no longer about repairing the problem and making up for lost wages, it was about redistributing wealth. The insurance companies were forced to raise their prices to replenish the pot and that cost was forced on to the plumbers who passed it on to us.

Now that the cost of plumbing was too high for average homeowners to pay they are forced to enter a risk pool of their own. They are being forced to pay for protection against a toilet overflow that may never happen. They will spend years paying a monthly premium that will amount to hundreds of times the cost of parts and labor that would've been charged before the threat of lawsuits.

So what happens when the lawsuits create a gap between the cost of insurance and the income of those who are forced to have it. It's simple, go after those who have the means to pay for that plumbing and can afford the risk without entering the pool. That's where politics come in. The lawyers decide to make the masses feel angry because many are at risk of a plumbing disaster and cannot afford the insurance while the rich get away scott free.

The lawyers use that anger to drum up overwhelming support and move into public office where they can force those rich people, through legislation, to enter the pool and pay a higher premium in order to lower the cost to those who cannot afford it.

At the end of the day what has changed? The homeowner is still paying for a service that they might not use, the cost of parts is still the same, the plumber makes the same amount of money for his labor, the insurance company assumes the same amount of risk and the lawyers are now making far more money and have gained much more power! Is that the change you wanted?

Oh, something else has changed too. The rich guy is now paying out more than before. He is forced to fill that gap by making a change of his own. How many times have you been hired by a poor person? How many jobs are created by the bum on the corner? Are you poor? How many people have you hired lately? The rich guy is the one who pays our wages. He buys our product and supports our services. If you take money from the rich guy he will simply buy less, use less and hire fewer people. That's a fact!

So who are you hurting? How many plumbers have just given up because they can't pay the price or take the risk of staying in business? How many insurance companies have fallen to the greed of lawyers who have crushed any hope of profit in the name of fairness. How many of us live with our leaky faucets rather than dedicate our grocery money to an insurance company that would, no doubt, drop us should we actually need them because they have been burned by lawyers so many times.

Obviously I was referring to our healthcare situation and not plumbing but for some reason people think that they have a right to free health care so they refuse to listen to reason. Let me set it straight... HEALTHCARE IS NOT A RIGHT! Not unlike plumbing protection, it is simply a goal. Companies once offered health insurance as an insentive to work for them. It replaced a higher wage and helped draw in those who had proven themselves in order to make a company more successful.

The thought was that you would be more likely to apply yourself if you were promised a better life for doing so. I know that in todays climate that sounds like a radical concept but once upon a time they only rewarded the winners. That drove many to make an extra effort to win and brought the world from the horrible place it was before this country was formed to the amazing place it is now.

The new proposals for health reform will absolutly cause the collapse of the entire global healthcare system! Over the past 100 years it has been our free market that has driven medical research around the world. Any breakthrough that has come out of socialist systems owes itself to us. They built from the shoulders of our research and our economy. Medication in Canada is only cheap there because we pay the difference here. Heart transplants in Germany can only take place because we provided the capitol for the research. England can only offer free education to it's healthcare providers because we wrote the books.

Don't fool yourself, the only people who will gain from free healthcare are our lawyers and politicians. The rest of the world will most definatly lose!

Fun fact.. Almost half of todays congressmen were lawyers and more than 70% of those are Democrats. That's not to say that all lawyers are bad but then how can you tell them apart when they've made a career of supressing evidence.