Stealth Socialization

The ‘free-market alternative’ is nearly as bad as out-and-out socialized medicine.

By Michael E. Hammond
Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Fewer than a handful of times in my 34 years of studying legislation has there been an issue so critical that one can say history pivots around it. But I am convinced that the way Congress resolves the health-care debate in September will define America for the rest of our lifetimes. And many in the conservative movement are unaware of the test that is about to face them.

First, where are we?

I believe we have succeeded in lessening the danger of a bill consisting wholly of a “single-payer system” — a system where the government takes all the health-care money and pays all the health-care bills. The liberals are still holding out for the possibility of a foot-in-the-door optional program to allow everyone who wants to insure with the government to do so. But this won’t be the central part of the bill.

Rather, the principal danger now is what is called the “individual mandate.” You can get some idea of what this would look like from S. 391 — legislation introduced by liberal senator Ron Wyden (D., Ore.). The core of the individual-mandate system — also called the Massachusetts Plan — is that Congress would “solve” the problem of 48 million uninsured by requiring the 48 million, under penalty of law, to buy government-approved insurance from a government-approved private carrier.

Tragically, at least a scattering of conservatives have bought this idea as “the free-market alternative to socialized medicine.”

But consider what we’re talking about:

- State-government bureaucrats would determine all the specifics of as few as two acceptable policies per state that the uninsured would be required to choose between.

- All non-unionized employers would have to retool their soon-to-be-mandated health insurance to conform to the specifications that the government bureaucrats set for the uninsured.

- The insurance that the 48 million would be required to purchase would lump healthy people in with the very ill and require them to be charged the same rate as a person already consuming $100,000 of medical care per day.

How much would the uninsured and non-unionized employers have to pay? Well, as with the bank-bailout bill, the specifics will be filled in only after the bill is passed and we are trapped in the system. But according to one insurance-industry source, the cost of an average family policy today is $13,000.

And this would be less a government-mandated insurance system and more a government-mandated income-redistribution system.

For example, if you are an illegal alien (9.3 million of the 48 million uninsured are not U.S. nationals), the government — meaning the taxpayers — will probably pay for your insurance under the final bill (though not under S. 391). But if you are middle-income, the government will have effectively imposed on you a $13,000 health-care tax — in large part, to pay for other people’s care.

S. 391 dubs these required insurance policies Healthy Americans Private Insurance (HAPI) plans (ironically pronounced “happy plans”). But for the 15 to 20 million uninsured middle-income Americans, their HAPI plan is likely to bring economic devastation. If you can’t pay the $13,000 without losing your home or small business, too bad. Failure to pay will, under S. 391, result in an annual fine of 115 percent, which would amount to $14,950. And, to top it off, you can’t discharge the fine in bankruptcy.


For employers who would be required to provide currently uninsured workers with policies meeting HAPI-plan specifications, there will be only two ways of escaping the increased costs: (1) unionizing prior to the effective date of the program; or (2) firing the workers.

As with the bank-bailout bill, we have no idea what “services” your state bureaucrats will require to be included in your HAPI plan. Just as an example, however, any health insurer who fails to pay for abortions (including late-term abortions) under the supplemental-insurance requirements of section 111(b)(3) will not be allowed to provide HAPI plans to individuals or quasi-HAPI plans to non-unionized employers — and will surely go out of business.

Even worse, there is nothing to stop a majority of states from requiring all individuals and non-union employers to pay for abortion insurance. The abortion debate will effectively be ended, with government-enforced abortion-on-demand in most of the country.

Our elected representatives have already stuck us with an $800-billion bank-bailout bill without reading it beforehand — and then tried to explain that they didn’t foresee that its open-ended provisions would be implemented with open-ended recklessness.

We are facing an even more enormous pass-it-first/explain-it-later threat from the individual mandate. Anyone who allows this to happen without screaming to high heaven has only himself to blame.