Ever wonder why it will cost the government more than $1 trillion to do what private industry does while making a profit? Like the Senate plan is supposedly cheaper than the House's, but it's still going to cost $829 billion (estimate based on the conceptualization, not a detailed bill), and there will still be 25 million people still without insurance.
Since right now about 30 million people don't have insurance, the expense of covering an additional 5 million is absolutely astronomical. Seems to me, you could replace those people entirely with bionic body parts for $829 billion.
So what good is it?
Anyway, no one mentions the following point, but to me it illustrates the beauty of capitalism.
Insurance companies DO NOT just collect money from healthy people and use it to pay for the medical expenses of others. The insurance companies take the money they get from premium payments and invest it. As an investment, the money is used to fund a range of things, but mostly fairly conservative things, like municipal bonds, blue chip stocks and bonds, etc. etc.
Same with private pension funds. Pension funds don't just collect the money and keep it in a vault. The money is put to work through all kinds of investments. Corporations that have "self-funded" retirement and health insurance programs have these same types of investment funds. Unions have these same kind of pension funds.
Therefore, if you start out with maybe $100,000, with good and experienced fund managers, you get a fairly predictable return of XX% on this money every year. It's the returns (also known as capital gains) that are actually used to pay the medical costs and the pensions.
By contrast, a government-funded system -- even a government option -- represents only the simple transfer of funds from my pocket into yours, or vice versa. There is no investment, no growth. It's just a redistribution of income, like if I "redistribute" your car to drive myself to work because my car broke down -- and don't pay you anything for it.
This will end up EXACTLY like Social Security, which is supposed to be bankrupt this year by one account. Social Security actually went broke a long time ago. Maybe the difference this year is that more payments will be paid out of Social Security funds than are being paid into it.
Anyway, if you took that 7.5% or whatever it is that most employees pay into Social Security and invested it instead in the stock market, or even in your own business or a family business, you'd get some returns from it -- capital gains. If you invested, say, $50,000.00 over your lifetime, you'd probably have double that to retire on or to leave to your kids. What's wrong with that?
Of course, there's risk involved. But there's just as much risk involved by letting the government do it. The government gets its money from us. If we're not making money, the government isn't going to collect much in taxes, is it?
So, if private insurance is destroyed, it will take billions and billions of dollars out of the national economy. That's billions and billions less to extend for mortgages, business start-ups and expansion, even money that might be donated to charities and other non-profit organizations. It will slow growth significantly and will inevitably cost even more jobs and eliminate innumerable economic opportunities for everyone.
Sound like a good idea?
For some reason, marxists absolutely hate the idea of economic growth. I don't know why. Really, what the heck is wrong with profits? You know, most really rich people live on only a fraction of their incomes and invest the rest -- either directly through their own advisors and brokers, or indirectly, through banks. That's the grease that keeps the economy rolling. That is the "capital" in "capitalism."
Why is it supposed to be bad?
Karl Marx had this big thing about labor being exploited, etc. However, his whole concept of "production" was that it all came from labor and land. Like some poor guy would plant potatoes, and then some other guy would sell them and keep the money. I suppose feudalism did work that way.
However, since the Industrial Revolution, production has resulted less and less from actual, manual labor than from ideas -- innovation, information, and technical skill. American workers aren't exploited. In fact, a lot of American workers have investments in the stock market, they have bonds, mutual funds, shares in the companies they either manage or work for. They're capitalists themselves.
Look at the balance sheet for any corporation. Labor is a huge expense, usually 100 times or more the actual profit, if there is one. In the financial industries, those much-despised bonuses go to workers, after all, don't they? So how can Marx or anyone else claim that the corporation's employees aren't benefiting from capitalism and profit-making? As a matter of fact, the workers usually get paid before the shareholders and investors do.
Capitalism hasn't hurt American workers at all. Rather, it's made it possible for them to enjoy a pretty high standard of living with unlimited potential for personal growth and development -- as well as supporting a lot of people who simply don't work for one reason or another (retired, disabled, in congress...)
So what the heck is the problem? Why wipe out something that works so well?
It's stupid. Just stupid. There is absolutely no advantage to it, no reason to do it, except to make us all dependent upon the government and keep us that way.
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