One of the popular healthcare reforms advanced by conservatives is healthcare savings accounts. Conservatives maintain that this reform is the solution to the decades-long healthcare crisis. By having everyone deposit money into a healthcare savings account, much like people put their money into IRAs, the healthcare crisis, they say, will finally be brought to an end.
These conservative reformers are living in la la land. What they don’t understand is that there is no conceivable healthcare reform plan that can resolve America’s perpetual healthcare crisis. Anyone who devotes his time, energy, and money trying to do so is just wasting his time, energy, and money. Even if you put the 50 most brilliant conservatives and the nation’s 50 top healthcare experts in a room for a month, along with 100 of the most powerful computers in the world, at the end of that month those 100 people would still not have come up with what the mainstream media calls a “comprehensive healthcare reform” package that would resolve America’s healthcare crisis.
That’s because any healthcare reform plan leaves the root cause of America’s healthcare crisis — Medicare and Medicaid — intact. Those are two massive socialist programs that dominate healthcare. They are the reason for America’s decades-old healthcare crisis. Any reform plan that leaves Medicare and Medicaid intact is doomed to fail.
America once had the finest healthcare system in the world. That was before Medicare and Medicaid were adopted. Healthcare prices were low and stable, so low and stable that hardly anyone had major medical insurance. Going to the doctor was like going to the grocery store. How many people today have grocery store insurance to protect against the soaring prices of groceries? No one. And that’s the way it was before Medicare and Medicaid.
Moreover, doctors loved what they did in life. Healthcare innovations and improvements were skyrocketing. And doctors and hospitals were treating the poor, on a purely voluntary basis. In my hometown of Laredo, Texas, every day doctors offices were filled with people, most of whom couldn’t pay, and the doctors knew it. Nonetheless, I never heard of one instance where a doctor turned away anyone. It was the same at our local hospital, which was named Mercy Hospital.
Then Medicare and Medicaid were adopted in the 1960s. That was the beginning of the end of the finest healthcare system in history. Over time, healthcare costs began soaring. People began buying medical insurance to protect themselves. Doctors starting forming all sorts of different associations and organizations in response to the ever-growing healthcare crisis. The federal government embarked on the road to healthcare regulation and insurance regulation.
It all became one great big crisis. But rather than repeal the cause of the crisis, U.S. officials doubled down with reform after reform. Of course, no reform ever worked to resolve the crisis. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to do that, but even advocates of that reform now say that a full-fledged socialist healthcare system is necessary to deal with the crisis that partial socialism has brought about. How logical is that?
There is but one solution to America’s healthcare crisis. That solution is freedom and the free market, which necessarily means the repeal, not the reform, of both Medicare and Medicaid. Even that is not sufficient. To restore full health to America’s healthcare system, it is necessary to separate healthcare and the state, just as our ancestors separated church and state. That means getting the government entirely out of the business of healthcare.
There is no other solution to America’s healthcare crisis. Socialism is an inherently defective paradigm. It has never worked because it is incapable of working. Medicare and Medicaid are cancerous tumors on the body politic. They need to be removed entirely for health to be restored to the body politic. Leaving the cancer there and trying to reform it is a prescription for disaster.
The only thing that works is freedom and free markets. That’s the only way to end America’s perpetual healthcare crisis.