Is ObamaCare Really A Success?

People are defining ObamaCare as a success because they now have insurance that’s subsidized by government. That’s not a success when more people are on a form of welfare — it’s a success when people are able to pay their own way.

Are food stamps successful when more people go on it every year? Are people being helped out of poverty by welfare if more people need it every year? Hardly. That’s a disaster.

We need to look at success as how many people no longer need it than by the amount of people that do. If we had a program that got people producing more and using it less and less I’d be all for that.

Poverty and other social ills are problems to be sure, but the solution is not curing the symptom but by treating the disease. The disease is always the same– an inability of a person to provide for one’s own self. Give a person that, and all the other problems go away.

As Ronald Reagan said, the best social program I know of is a good job.

A lot of the GOP is claiming they want to do something about ObamaCare now that we have control of Congress. The battle cry is “Repeal and Replace.”

But what does that mean? Lower the taxes on it? Remove the mandate? Eliminate the employer portion? No one knows.

I want one thing — restore the free market in health care. We haven’t had a free market in 50 years in health care and it’s about time someone begins to talk to about it. No one in the Republican party or the Democrats is talking about it. No one even knows what it means.

I do, and probably because few alive today even remember what a free market looks like. It looks like house calls and small neighborhood clinics. It looks like paying with cash and simplified billing. It looks like doctors driving the same car you do, and living in the same neighborhood and not living like the town tycoon.

Since Medicare and its brother Medicaid was introduced, health care costs have risen in the triple digits when before those bills were passed it was single digit increases. I want a market where you buy insurance for the big things which it pays for 100%, while the little things you pay for in a competitive market. I want doctors to be able to post prices. I want to be able to shop around. I want to go to any doctor I choose and not worry about all the stupid little rules we both have to play by now.

Most of all, I want people to pay their own way in life and therefore act responsibly in their own life’s decisions. Those that don’t will have to suffer the consequences just like any other of 20 million life decisions we make.

How does that begin? A repeal of ObamaCare — not “repeal and replace.” Give the sick and elderly that are in the system now an ability to exit it. Restore a market where you can bargain or shop around for a better health care product not a better health insurance premium. Encourage and enable charities to help the sick and the poor, not punishing them when they do. That’s why they get the tax break after all.

Most of all we need to kill the politically correct idea that we are our brother’s keeper. We are not. Our nation’s beginnings came from the concept that if you don’t work, you don’t eat and it’s served us well for 200 plus years.

Jesus wanted us to help our fellow man and that’s pretty hard to do when the government takes half our paycheck.

After all, he never suggested you outsource your charity to government.

Thomas Purcell is nationally syndicated columnist, author of the book “Shotgun Republic” and is host of the Liberty Never Sleeps podcast. More of his work can be found at libertyneversleeps.com

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