"Health Care (Health Insurance) Reform": Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic

All the health "reform" being discussed and proposed in the House and Senate, overall, is too little too late and is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. "Sir, would you like the lounge chair astern or the padded one to starboard, before we all slide into the drink?" Laugh out loud.

The 2009 legislation is all about making sure that single payer, which has become very obviously necessary, is delayed indefintely. The more poor the US becomes, and the more excessive health costs become, the less the US will be able to implement single payer, so it is possible that the delay will actually turn out to be pretty much permanent.

There are many shortcomings, but the top two specific problems with the proposals are:

1. There is no where near enough cost reduction / cost containment power. So the Titanic is still going down. BOTH single payer and strong and immediate cost reduction is necessary, and I must say that this was obvious even before the economy and the people in it started to drown due in part to excessive health costs.

2. The mandate and the associated penalties amount to an unprecedented, regressive (exactly how regressive is not clear to me yet) and apparently an unconstitutional tax.

The last time I checked, taxation is supposed to be only for the common good, and private health insurance is definitely not a common good. Isn't it obvious that in a democracy the Government can never have a tax/mandate where the proceeds go directly to a private industry, where the Government is little more than a bill collector for that industry? Won't the Supreme Court eventually rule that forcing someone to buy a private insurance product is unconstitutional?

In general taxation becomes invalid, intolerable, and regressive when the Government plays little or at best a marginal role in providing the goods and services involved, and even more so if the Government mandates the purchase of a private product, as in this case.

I do like the Medicaid expansion in the House bill, but that is like 2% of the bill really, and you have to be really, really poor to benefit from that. Those who are just "kind of poor" will have to maneuver through a new large bureaucracy in order to get subsidized by the Government so that they can meet the requirment that they buy private health insurance.

The public option is lame or dead on arrival, mainly because when all is said and done the cost to consumers will be, at best, 10-12% less than a full scale private health insurance plan. That is no where near enough less. And if forced to choose I might actually stick with a private plan, since any new "public option" plan will not necessarily have enough providers associated with it to meet the care demand.

So where are we at, progressives? Are we just supposed to "just give fascism a chance" while we sit on the deck of the Titanic and await going down into the briny blue?

[The above is in response to this article.]