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Oct. 18, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

14:47

2510 Obamacare and Other Lies...

Some essential information about Obamacare.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molling from Freedomain Radio.
	Time to go back to mailbag at freedomainradio.com to see what the giant Borg brain of the listenership has come up with in terms of tasty philosophical question medleys.
	So, let's see here.
	You probably heard Mike Adams on the Alex Jones Show, says another person, talk about how it would take three years to fix the problems with the Unaffordable Snare Act, aka Obamacare.
	For the website to be functional, you mentioned not having a crystal ball, but instead two surprisingly accurate squishy ones and a programming background to boot.
	What is your take on this?
	I really like how you break these things down.
	Thanks.
	Chris, well, it is a complete mess.
	Obamacare needs about 7 million people to be even remotely economically sustainable, and that is using the government's own figures.
	It probably needs more than that.
	So, how does it work?
	Well, it is a transfer of wealth from those who don't need medical services to those who do need medical services, which means the young and the healthy, particularly the men, because men use much fewer healthcare services when they're young because they're not having kids and this and that.
	And so, it's a transfer of wealth from young males to females and to the elderly and to the chronically ill.
	Which is why very few people are able to sign up for it technically, but very few people want to sign up for it.
	Because the increase in...
	The rates for those who want these monthly payments is far greater than the fines they'll have to pay if they don't get insured, and they'll still be able to get health care if they want anyway.
	So people are going to opt to pay the fines.
	Now, the fines, of course, are going to have to increase if you don't just want people paying a bunch of fines and then getting free health care anyway.
	The fines are going to have to increase, and this has been noted by many thinkers for quite some time.
	The $600 million plus that was spent on this website It has resulted in, I mean, a complete catastrophe.
	I mean, even the designers say, well, it's, you know, 50,000 people at a time, given the number of uninsured Americans signing up at 50,000 a day, or 50,000 a day is kind of what they designed it for.
	It would take hundreds of years for everyone to sign up.
	So it's really badly designed.
	They say, well, it's a lot of volume.
	No, it's not a lot of volume.
	I mean, Amazon.com handles far more people.
	And so it's just your usual government mess.
	I mean, hundreds of $600 million plus spent on the website.
	Of course, it went to political donators, right?
	So, I mean, it's just payback for that.
	The architecture is terrible, of course, and even the data that's been entered.
	I mean, if the website had actually worked to the point where people had been able to enter their data at the rate, even 50,000 a day, the whole system would have broken down because they have to phone all these people because in the database, you know, Children are listed as wives.
	Genders are reversed.
	I mean, the medical history is all screwed up.
	So, I mean, they would either have to make the people match the genders, which would be a whole other healthcare issue.
	They'd have to turn children into wives, which I believe has not been legal for some time.
	And so they've actually had to phone a whole bunch of people back and say, well, what is it that you actually did write in?
	What are the actual facts?
	Because the data is just completely messed up.
	So, it is.
	It's a complete mess, and I'm sure the security is terrible, and the information is going to be exposed on the web, and thumb drives are going to be left around with all of the data on it.
	I mean, it's just going to be a complete mess.
	I mean, you might as well, you know, publish your doctor's history to Facebook with no privacy settings, because it's all going to be exposed and revealed, and I mean, there's going to be But of course, you know, I mean, why do people support all this nonsense in the government?
	Everybody knows that the government can't do anything competently to save its life because it has no incentive and people aren't personally accountable for their actions.
	I mean, if we think that the government can do a great job despite having no personal stake or incentive or loss in the matter, in fact, The worst job they do, the more money they tend to get, then all we have to tell, we have to just take this as a standard and apply it to children, because if it's a great idea for society, for the government, for big important projects like healthcare, then surely it's also a great idea for children, because healthcare is much more important than say a spelling test.
	So all we need to do is say to children that you get an A no matter what, and in fact if you study We're going to give you a C, and if you don't study, we're going to give you an A, and see if that changes children's behavior in terms of their willingness to learn things.
	And so if they do badly, they get better results, like they get better personal incentives.
	So if you don't study, we'll give you an A. If you do study, we'll give you a C. So the worse they do, the children are on the test, and the better they will get on the test and so on.
	We all understand that this would mean that kids would simply not study and they would make fun of people who study and a whole anti-studying culture would be built up and so on.
	It's just exactly the same thing with the government.
	We hold children to these moral standards that we refuse to hold elected officials accountable to because we just live in this weird world where children are subjected to infinitely higher and more rigorous moral standards than adults in political power are.
	So it's a complete mess.
	You know, millions of people visited the site, and I think the claim that a few tens of thousands of people have signed up, of those who have signed up, most of the data is just completely incorrect.
	And, I mean, it's a natural mess.
	Why are people supporting this?
	Well, I think it's fairly simple.
	I mean, I don't have any proof for this, but following the logic of power is pretty axiomatic.
	The NSA has been spying on congressmen and congresswomen and other I've been spying on them for years.
	So my guess is that Anthony Weiner isn't the only person with something embarrassing to hide on his browser history or his Twitter feed.
	So the NSA is simply going to all the politicians and saying, look, you support this, or we're going to have anonymous leakage of all your browser history and all of your emails and all that kind of stuff.
	And even if you haven't done anything wrong, you still don't want all of this stuff released, right?
	I mean, I'm sure it's just a matter of shaking people down with all of their computerized electronic history and so on.
	And it's just easier.
	Just go support the damn thing because otherwise you're going to have a whole bunch of awkward questions to ask and answer and you'll be tossed around like a hacky sack from hell among the feet of the media.
	So that would be my guess.
	Yeah, it's going to be a mess and they're going to have to extend stuff and they're going to have to Have massive amounts of people come in and check on the data, and the data is going to be a complete mess, and people are going to get coverage, and then they'll have to increase the fines.
	I mean, this is how it's going to be.
	This has been widely predicted by myself and other people for many years.
	It is going to be a massive clusterfrak of truly biblical dimensions, and as a result, it's going to lose a lot of money.
	As a result, they're going to have to print more money and or raise taxes and or borrow more money.
	And the whole thing's going to be such a mess that, in a weird, perverse way, people are going to say, well, we need the government to take it over completely, because a public-private partnership is not working, so let's make it all public.
	So, anyway, that's just my thoughts on it.
	I'm sorry that people have to go through it.
	I'm sorry that it is part of people's lives.
	If you do a Google search and you can look up how much rates are increasing, all the young people are getting higher rates, and some of the older people are getting lower rates.
	Insurance can't work if you let in pre-existing conditions.
	It's like applying for life insurance after you're dead.
	Insurance cannot work if you allow for pre-existing conditions because people then wait till they get sick and then they apply for insurance, which is another reason why they have to force people to buy insurance because it was some years ago that the government forced insurance companies to stop rejecting people with pre-existing conditions.
	In other words, people who Did not buy insurance when they were healthy.
	Insurance can't work if healthy people don't buy it, which is why now healthy people have to be forced to buy it.
	Because insurance companies were dying because young people were saying, well, screw it, I'm not going to buy.
	I mean, if I can just apply for health care insurance when I get sick, I'll just wait until I get sick and apply for health care insurance.
	So the health care insurance was like, we're dying.
	This is the whole rationale behind insurance.
	I mean, you don't get to buy fire insurance for your house after it burns down.
	Because that would be insane.
	But of course, in the realm of healthcare and democracy and the violence of the state and so on, it all starts to make sense.
	So some years ago, the government said you can't deny people with pre-existing conditions.
	And so rates went up like crazy because people were applying for healthcare only when they needed, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of healthcare.
	And so they drove prices up like crazy.
	For young and healthy people, and so young and healthy people stopped buying insurance because it simply wasn't worth it for them at all.
	And so now they have to be forced to buy the insurance that they don't want to fund all of the pre-ex.
	Now, I get it.
	Some people, and I understand this.
	I mean, it makes sense in a purely mammalian, get resources for free standpoint.
	Ethically, it makes no sense at all.
	It's just initiating the use of force to prevent the free exchange of contract.
	But it makes sense.
	So people who don't buy insurance, crossing their fingers or, you know, government has made insurance ridiculously expensive for more than 40 or 50 years, Well, people don't buy insurance, and then they get hit with some weird illness, and by God, that's terrible.
	And they don't want to face the huge bills, and maybe they can't even afford it.
	So they freak out, and their family freaks out, and they start blogging and posting, and the sympathetic media picks it up and says, oh, look at these poor sick people.
	They're not able to get insurance.
	They're going to die, and blah, blah, blah.
	Terrible, monstrous, horrible.
	I absolutely understand that, why people would do that.
	And they want to ride the backs of other people and say, okay, well, I didn't buy insurance, but I'm sick now.
	You're just going to let me die.
	Now, in a free society, they would be relying on charity, and of course, insurance would be so cheap that everyone would take it.
	I mean, the whole point, you'd buy your insurance even before you had a kid, right?
	And the whole point of insurance, like I bought life insurance years ago, now it pays for itself, because I paid into it a lot when I got it when I was in my early 20s.
	And now it just reinvests and pays for itself, so I don't have to.
	And that's the whole point of health insurance.
	You usually have, like, a 20-year grace period from your late teens to your late 30s where you don't usually need much healthcare, I mean, if you're a man.
	So you pay for it then, and then it accumulates, and it starts paying for itself because the insurance company would reinvest the money you've put in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And so the whole point is then by the time you get old, Your healthcare is supposed to be paid for because if you put all this money aside when you were younger and it's been reinvested and you've been with the same company, that's how it used to work, right?
	Anyway, now it's a complete mess.
	So, it is going to end up either with a repeal of government control over healthcare or it is going to end up with socialized healthcare.
	And it's by far more likely to be the latter because, of course, if you're the government, I mean, there's so many things to do to lower healthcare costs.
	I mean, you would Stop these crazy licensing requirements for doctors, which means that they have to go to school for like 10 years to say, oh, you have strep throat, here's some antibiotic, which frankly spit into a vending machine cup, put it in the vending machine, it should spit out the right number of pills, and that's about all you'd need.
	Of course, you can't have any of that.
	So if you start messing around with the barriers to entry, For doctors, like to become a doctor, to become a midwife, to become a nurse, to, you know, why is it that you have to get a prescription for stuff that you've had 10 times before?
	It means being over-prescribed anyway, so it's not like that's the issue.
	So, if you really piss off the doctors who have sacrificed a lot and, you know, gone a lot into debt and they want the high income, So, if you sacrifice the interests of the doctors by opening the floodgates for people to practice medicine who can show competence to the insurance companies and to the people they want to treat, then the doctors are all going to go on strike.
	Now, if the doctors all go on strike, everyone freaks out and you just have to put it back in place.
	So, you're not going to do anything to restrict the ability of doctors to earn a high salary through a government-granted cartel or monopoly.
	You're not going to do anything about that.
	You're certainly not going to do anything to piss off the pharmaceutical companies.
	Otherwise, they're going to go on strike or they're going to cause problems.
	And since, like, half of Americans are on some sort of permanent medication, that can't be allowed.
	And, of course, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare companies, insurance companies, and, of course, Wall Street companies are huge donators towards the political machine of operation.
	And nobody's going to...
	I mean, everybody who gets in power has already been bought and paid for.
	By these special interest groups.
	You don't get to vote to anyone who has your interest at heart.
	I mean, they never even appear on the national or even the local scene.
	I mean, it's like watching the NASCAR driver get into his car.
	I mean, all the stickers on his car, the NASCAR driver is only able to get into his car because everything's been already bought and paid for by the people who sponsor and donate to him to get the stickers on his car.
	And of course, if, you know, as some people have suggested, we were to get the same rule applied to congressmen and senators and so on, That politicians should have stickers on them to denote who their donators were, and they should, of course, you wouldn't be able to see Obama at all.
	You'd just see these giant Wall Street logos and healthcare logos walking around, you know, like something out of a Macy's float, and you wouldn't even see the guy behind it.
	I mean, you don't get to vote for anyone who's interested in your welfare.
	Really, you get to vote for people who are bought and paid for by special interest groups.
	Everyone who wants to take from the collective has a huge incentive to do so.
	Every mosquito is willing to risk death to get a little bit of your blood because it's so important to them, whereas you're not going to get rid of a mosquito by jumping off a cliff.
	It's true, you'll get rid of the mosquito, but you'll die.
	So the mosquito will risk death to take your blood.
	You're not going to risk death to fight off each and every mosquito.
	It's the same thing in democracy.
	Everybody who can get A buck from the general population ends up with hundreds of millions of dollars.
	So they've got hundreds of millions of dollars worth of incentive to go and steal from the general population, but each individual member of that general population only has a dollar's worth of incentive to deny them.
	And each, you know, if it was only one, it wouldn't be a big deal, but when you get 10,000 mosquitoes, suddenly you deflate pretty quickly.
	I hope that makes sense.
	Thank you for great and fantastic questions.
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