Drudge linked to a Breitbart article headlining Obama's attack on TV networks.
The thrust of the article is that Obama is running scared from all the cable TV news clips of townhall protests. What really captured my attention from the article, however, was this quote:
Obama is saying that people feel enslaved by their insurance companies -- they are afraid of the power they wield over them through their ability to provide or deny health coverage. Of course, the supremely ironic part of this is the way he is describing the health insurance companies in the same terms that we should be describing Islamic jihadists and terrorists. Americans have in fact been literally held hostage and actually been murdered by their captors...Maybe Obama should be more worried about those who physically behead their prisoners rather than those who only do so metaphorically...but I'll move on so as not to get too sidetracked.
What I really want to focus on is Obama's attention to the power that insurance companies wield.
He's trying to pull a classic absolutist argument -- he's suggesting that there is this more or less aristocratic class of insurance CEOs that stand over the poor commoners. These aristocrats lord their power over the helpless masses and tyrannize them with their wealth oligarchies. The commoners stand no chance in a revolt against these corrupt lords. Rather, their only hope lies in transferring their fealty and obedience to someone who stands above the aristocracy -- to a single man whose love and commitment to the people will guarantee the toppling the fatcats and the truly common good. It's how French absolutism got itself entrenched in government policy. The oppressed love to put their hope and trust in heroes. Obama is depicting his government as the ferocious royal lion that will tear apart those who stand between him and the people. Of course, we all know how well French absolutism worked out.
I digress, again, though.
What most concerns me is that Obama is acknowledging that he who controls healthcare essentially controls the people needing healthcare. If health insurance companies hold the people under them as hostages, what will stop the government from holding hostage those subscribing to government healthcare?
Consider the following scenario: Three years from now you suddenly find yourself losing your private health insurance because the economy has tanked even more. Your employer can't afford to offer you the benefits you once had, and you can't afford to buy it on your own. Your only affordable option is Obamacare. Election time comes. You can vote for Obama -- the guy who dictates your healthcare options...or you can vote for some conservative who has been running on a platform of dismantling government healthcare. You still have the freedom to vote against your own health insurance provider...but it seems to defy common sense to do so.
Obama is right -- those who control health insurance do hold their clients hostage. Under Obamacare, it seems as though it's more than just the client that would be hostage--it would also be the hostage's vote.
This is precisely why you don't give slaves the right to vote.
As long as one assumes that the current administration and every successive one (left, right, and in-between) is more moral than the average health care provider and that they will be more intelligent than those that are motivated by profit, government health care could work.
Though, vote or no vote, I would rather be hostage to an institution which can only take from me that which I have ceded to it, rather than to an institution that is allowed to withhold my property (or abridge my liberty) as long as the latest legislation allows it.
Posted by: Boethius | August 15, 2009 at 10:21 PM
Well, it looks like news outlets are reporting that Obamacare has surrendered the government option (and the "end of life advising")...
Seems to me like all those protests have really paid off.
Shucks...now, I wish I had been part of some of them.
Posted by: Peter Terp | August 16, 2009 at 10:57 PM