Obamacare and Congressional Overkill

The GOP has vowed to repeal Obamacare. In fact, the Party is so passionate about it that many members put the issue as the main goal of the 2011 session of Congress. Yet the critics will yet wag their tongues, crying out about those who need health care not getting it, that preexisting conditions won't be covered for those seeking health insurance, and what about the kids who should (critics say) be on their parents coverage all the way up until they're 26?

These are relatively easy points to counter. By 26, outside of special circumstances, you ought to, as a rule, be of independent means anyway. Those who do in fact need health care will get it: no emergency room in the country with an ounce of charity will refuse to treat someone having a heart attack. Preexisting conditions must be seen more on a case by case basis: having cancer or high blood pressure may count, but pregnancy? That it almost always a controllable condition as it is almost always the result of elective behavior.

But the common thread within those individual circumstances which is not discussed when talking about the issue of health care or, it seems, when considering almost any other question before the nation, is the notion of laws needing to address any and all matters even remotely connected to a given debate. Why do our political leaders feel that every problem within our country must be faced en masse?

Why, for example, because there are many folks without health care, must the entire way we access health care be changed? Can't we simply address the troubles of those who don't have it by doing what we can (outside of simply saying, as Obamacare essentially does, 'you must get it', as though legislative fiat is all that is required to solve a problem) to create a system which makes it more affordable through private and individual initiative?

If we want to insure that preexisting conditions be treated properly, why not pass a single law which says that insurers must treat them? Of, more precisely, define which such conditions must be treated? Why change everything when what we really want to do is make the playing field just for all? Why not merely address the particulars with particular laws rather than mess with the whole scheme?

The only real reason to do this is to put the people under the thumb of the government. The group of Congressional leaders recently shown the door, no matter how much they may have said they only wanted to help, no matter how sincere they may have been in wanting to make decent health care available for all, ultimately called for a system which would give Washington unprecedented control over who gets what. Especially when we are talking about human lives, our lives, not DC's, we are in truth talking about something vile and tyrannical.

That is why the GOP calls Obamacare the greatest threat to our freedom. Because who controls who gets what in terms of the treatment of disease and other matters of the physical human condition, controls us. Those folks, that bureaucracy, those minions within the beltway, will eventually decide who lives and dies. If they are given total reign over health care.

In the long run, that means more than whether pregnancy is a preexisting condition or not.