Further Thoughts

Depending on how you parse your Google query, my earlier post here comes up as one of the first responses in the search for an answer to "Does HR3200 Really Ban Private Health Insurance?"

(I don't mind not being the number-one answer, really I don't, although I could wish I wasn't beat out by the barking moonbats of the left at the huffer's post and kostipation daily...)

Anyway.

An email I received from a website called Free Our Health Care Now explains it pretty well:

The House health reform bill will outlaw private insurance coverage that is bought and sold in the open market. Instead, Congress wants to force all private insurance outside the place of work to be purchased in an "exchange" created and controlled by the government. Also, within the "exchange" insurance not approved by the government will be outlawed! So much for private plans! So much for our ability to choose!

What kind of care will you get from the health plan the government does approve? A new federal health board will decide whether your health care is "effective" or "appropriate." According to Tom Daschle, the idea is based on Britain's model which has determined that one year of life is worth only $44,000. The health board will consist of 17 bureaucrats appointed by the Secretary of HHS, whose job is to "enable clinicians, patients, consumers, and payers to make more informed health care decisions that improve quality and value." I don't need the government to "enable" me to make decisions that improve quality and value for me. Do you?

The bold type was in the original email; the italicized, underlined portion was added by me. Shall we consider that again?

HR 3200 will "outlaw private insurance coverage that is bought and sold in the open market."

Technically, I suppose that HR3200 doesn't outlaw private health insurance--except for the minor detail that a political appointee gets to decide what's available. This, of course, is a socialist's idea of "choice"--not unlike Henry Ford's "any color you want, as long as you want black."

Sure, you can select your own health insurance policy, as long as it is from the approved list.

And how does a policy get on the approved list?

Here's a thought, which I shared earlier this week:

What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.
Edmund Burke (1729-1727) British Member of Parliament
Select Works, Lawbook Exchange, Clark J, 2005
(Quoted in Mark Levin, Liberty and Tyranny, Threshhold NY NY, 2009)