Fosters
4/16/2010
Laconia Daily Sun
4/20/2010
After reading state Sen. Kathleen Sgambati’s opinion piece on health insurance reform, the first question I’d ask is: “Has the senator actually read the massive federal health care overhaul legislation?” The picture of a utopian world without suffering that she paints in her column is just as erroneous as her apparent understanding of the law that just passed.
Nothing in this world comes free. It should be telling that Democratic leaders in Congress had to hold off the supposed benefits of the program for the first four years to keep its reported cost under $1 trillion. In other words, Americans are going to be paying taxes on this program for four years before anyone receives its main benefits. How would you like to make payments on a car for four years before the dealership allows you to drive it off the lot?
So who is going to pay for this health care overhaul once its costs are fully realized and not adjusted for deception? There will always be someone who has to spend time away from his or her family, working long and hard to produce wealth in this country. These are the people that will be paying for this new program, which at its core is a wealth redistribution plan.
In her op-ed, Sgambati also asserts that the health care overhaul will cut insurance rates, saying, “Without this legislation, insurance rates are expected to double by 2020.” So, what does she make of the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that with this legislation, insurance premiums will double in the next few years? This overhaul is expected to raise premiums by an additional 10 percent to 13 percent for Americans who get their insurance through the individual market.
Sgambati also says that “no man, woman, or child in America will ever have to worry about being without medical care” because of the health care overhaul. First of all, this was the case without the legislation. Because of the Hippocratic Oath, no man, woman or child in America has ever been denied medical care if they truly sought it. It’s just that whomever receives medical care in America is also expected to pay for the procedures and technologies they receive. It took entrepreneurs and innovators many years and millions of dollars to create what we now call health care, and such innovation is rewarded in a free market.
If by her statement, Sgambati meant to say that no American will be without health insurance because of the legislation, she would be mistaken. The overhaul is expected to insure some 32 million more Americans eventually (2019), but it will leave another 21 million uninsured.
That brings me to Sgambati’s last false assertion that the overhaul “respects individual choice.” This statement seems to ignore the fact that Americans will be forced to purchase health insurance starting in 2014. If they don’t have insurance by 2016, they will be fined 2.5 percent of their income or $2,085 per person, whichever is greater! For the people who prefer to pay for their health coverage outright or choose to take a risk and not buy coverage, this health care overhaul destroys those individuals’ choice.
As I’ve said in the past, this health care overhaul is bad legislation that tramples on the constitutional rights of New Hampshire residents. The federal government does not have the authority to force Americans to buy health insurance. As such, when I am elected to the state Senate, I will work to pass a bill to prohibit the unconstitutional mandates in the legislation from being enforced in New Hampshire.
The true problem with our medical system is the rising costs that are making it more and more unaffordable. The problem of cost, however, was ignored in this legislation. There are a lot of reforms that can be made to encourage competition and reduce costs. We should allow New Hampshire residents to buy insurance from companies in other states, opening up competition. We need medical malpractice tort reform in order to reduce the amount of unnecessary defensive medicine practiced. Finally, we need to decouple health insurance from employment, which would get the consumer back into the market and drive down insurance costs that are currently hidden from view.
All of these free-market solutions would truly reduce health insurance costs and increase long-term insurance choices for individuals and businesses. Unfortunately, Sen. Sgambati and President Obama seem more interested in redistributing our wealth and expanding government than they are in reducing the cost of health care.
Jim Forsythe
Republican primary candidate for the N.H. Senate, District 4
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