July 28, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:59
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| So the repeal of Obamacare the partial repeal or reform of Obamacare known as the skinny repeal has failed last night 1 45 a.m. | |
| Apparently, it's still fine to vote if you have a brain tumor John McCain cast the deciding vote with a couple of other Republicans siding with the Democrats to block the alterations to Obamacare Now This really isn't the end of the world. | |
| I mean obviously these problems in American health care go back a long time and you're not going to fix them overnight and of course now what's happened is sort of like the welfare state people have made decisions about their health and their exercise and their diet based upon subsidized or free health care and removing that is going to be painful and difficult. | |
| I mean we go back like a hundred years To American healthcare problems back in the day, this is even before World War I. All the American physicians got together and said, well, we can't make a buck. | |
| You know, there's too much competition here in the provision of healthcare. | |
| So they, you know, established cartels and they blocked other people from providing services. | |
| You know, they ran to the government, as special interest groups generally do, to create barriers to entry so that they could jack up prices internally. | |
| And this has been going on for a long time. | |
| Healthcare was ridiculously cheap. | |
| I mean, it's funny. It's one of these things, you know, like if you're in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, you think it takes like 12 million people to produce a loaf of bread because they're so damn scarce. | |
| But the reality is that the reason healthcare is expensive is because of government controls and regulation. | |
| The price of healthcare should be declining, like the price of computers and so on. | |
| But because the government's involved, like the cost of higher education, higher indoctrination, lower indoctrination, the price just keeps... | |
| Going up. The big change as well, of course, in American healthcare was in World War II when the government refused to allow or passed laws saying you could not give your employees raises because they wanted to control spending in the private sector so they could siphon off more for the war machine. | |
| And so in order to attract better employees, the employers, the company said, okay, we'll pay for your health care. | |
| We'll pay for your health care premiums. | |
| And that was a way that they could provide quote raises without violating the government's edicts. | |
| And then of course what happened was Because companies were paying for so many people's healthcare, they put them all together in a big pool, and they got reduced prices, and then everyone got used to that kind of healthcare cost, which was sort of non-existent. | |
| And of course, if your corporation pays your healthcare, you don't have to pay taxes on the income that you would use. | |
| To pay for your health care otherwise. | |
| So it seems like a free benefit. | |
| The problem is of course that the personal responsibility factor tends to get diminished. | |
| And so what happened then of course was that people got tied to their jobs. | |
| See companies really liked it. | |
| Because it lowered their employees' negotiating power when it came to work. | |
| Because especially if you weren't that healthy, if you were overweight or you were a smoker or you had other sort of health issues or potential health issues, then you were kind of tied to your job. | |
| Because if you quit, you would lose your employee-subsidized health care mandate, health care insurance. | |
| And then what would happen is you'd have to go and fight it out in the semi-free market of insurance insurance. | |
| To try and get another plan, which could be dicey. | |
| And of course, if you had a pre-existing condition, you would mostly be denied. | |
| And so people got tied to their jobs. | |
| They got kind of frustrated. And this lack of labor mobility is one of the reasons why the American economy has been underperforming for the last couple of decades. | |
| This lack of labor mobility has really harmed worker productivity, which is the basis of economic growth. | |
| Everybody wanted to get their own little special medical problem put onto an insurance plan and so you ended up with insurance covering things that were regular sort of preventive maintenance which is kind of like your car insurance covering an oil change like you know it has to be done it's not really random. | |
| Insurance is supposed to be for you know catastrophic random obviously hard to predict and very expensive You don't buy house insurance for, I don't know, getting locked out of your house or something like that. | |
| It's going to happen once in a while, perhaps. | |
| So what happened was people started piling more and more obscure ailments onto the general house. | |
| Base of insurers which the insurance companies didn't want to do but it was mandated by law. | |
| So then what happened was because people were sort of locked into their jobs and couldn't change jobs and were frustrated about all of that because they couldn't get insurance if it wasn't already provided by their employer. | |
| So the government in America basically said okay well insurance companies you're no longer allowed to deny coverage for people who have pre-existing conditions. | |
| Well, talk about detonating the entire statistical basis, actuarial basis of insurance. | |
| The whole point of insurance is you buy it before there's a problem. | |
| If you buy it after there's a problem, it's, I don't know, it's a scam, it's nonsense, it's something that the market would never sustain. | |
| Like if you have homeowners insurance against fire, you can't get the insurance policy over the crackling sounds of flames in the background. | |
| If your house is already in fire, you can't buy insurance against fire. | |
| I mean, this is so ridiculous, of course, right? | |
| Of course you can't. And the reason being that... | |
| The whole point is the uncertainty. | |
| It hasn't happened yet. And that allows insurance companies to work their statistical voodoo and figure out what the cost is based on. | |
| If everyone waits until their house is on fire before buying fire insurance, then there's no point having fire insurance. | |
| Everyone's premiums will be more than they would have paid privately because they have the cost of preparing their house, plus the overhead cost of the insurance company, so it's no longer economically viable. | |
| So when insurance companies were not allowed to deny people for pre-existing conditions based upon prior regulations that the government had put in place, the outcome was very predictable. | |
| So people said, okay, well the insurance company can't deny me for a pre-existing condition, so you know what? | |
| I'm just going to cancel my health insurance and I'm going to reapply when I get sick. | |
| Not that complicated, right? | |
| I mean, if the insurance company can't deny you your application for insurance against fire, if your house is already burnt down, then you just wait till your house burns down and then you'll get free money by applying for insurance for something that's already happened. | |
| So what happened then was sick people began to overwhelm The insurance markets, because the whole point of insurance is the vast majority of people have to not need it in order for the premiums to be even remotely affordable. | |
| And because people waited until they got sick and then applied for health insurance and then couldn't be denied, what happened was insurance began to be more and more a pool of just really sick people, because the premiums went up so much that young, healthy people said, | |
| forget it. It's not economically beneficial so they started dropping out of insurance as a whole and this was a lot of this was the uninsured and of course a lot it was new immigrants illegal immigrants and so on And so what happened was the healthy people began to leave the insurance market and it became largely populated by people who had, you know, sort of bottomless black holes of medical requirements and this drove premiums through the roof. | |
| Now, of course, what the government could have done is they could have, you know, reduced regulations, reduced barriers to entry, opened up more competition, In the insurance markets across state lines and so on, it could have gotten rid of the incentives for corporations to supply healthcare insurance to their employees. | |
| And it's ridiculous. A corporation doesn't pay your car insurance, it doesn't pay your life insurance usually. | |
| So it could have reduced government power but of course this to some degree came to a head when Obama was in power and so what he did of course was he sent out the attack dogs to round up the young healthy people and force them back into insurance. | |
| This of course was the you have to buy health insurance mandate in Obamacare. | |
| So, corralling all of the young healthy people who were fleeing the collapsing fiscal and political structure of terrible insurance, mostly inhabited by people who were already ill, they had to be rounded up and dragged back at gunpoint to buy health insurance. | |
| And some of them did, and of course some of them made a rational calculation and said, well, the... | |
| The cost of the premiums are still way higher than the penalties for not buying health insurance, so I'm just going to pay a little penalty and I'm still not going to buy the health insurance. | |
| And so this did not solve the problem and of course the Materialization of all of these supposed savings, which were never going to occur, didn't occur. | |
| And so things went from bad to worse. | |
| And the satisfaction with American health care was actually pretty high before Obamacare. | |
| Like, way north of 80% of Americans liked their health care, were content with it, content with their doctors, happy with it. | |
| So this wasn't some giant problem that needed fixing. | |
| What happened, of course, was that the Democrats, they always want to mess with the free market. | |
| Because they really dislike the free market. | |
| They're, you know, centralized, coercive command and control, centralized bureaucracy, central planning kind of people. | |
| And so they always want to mess with the free market so they can say, well, look, you see, the free market doesn't work and therefore we need more government. | |
| I mean, the purpose of Obamacare was not to fix health care, but to break health care so that single payer could be brought in after the disaster of the free market had been exposed through, you understand how all of this, how all of this So, as far as the repeal goes, the big challenge, of course, is that whenever legislation changes, particularly if it changes towards freedom, there are identifiable losers and often hidden winners. | |
| And the identifiable losers are the people who lose their healthcare insurance and have to rely on charity or other government programs and so on to get their healthcare. | |
| So those people, it's a tough life for them. | |
| It's a tough transition. It's very difficult. | |
| The people who then get healthcare aren't nearly as happy as the people who lose healthcare are unhappy, right? | |
| It's the old Bastiatts, right? | |
| The... The visible costs and the hidden benefits, or the visible benefits and the hidden costs. | |
| And so the media always wants people to make decisions based upon individual suffering rather than general principles. | |
| Individual suffering rather than general principles. | |
| And so what they do if they don't like a particular piece of legislation is they hunt around until they find someone who's, you know, tragic-eyed and photogenic and they then will find... | |
| who's lost out as a result of this legislation. | |
| They go and they interview that person and they broadcast that person and people like them... | |
| Faces of a disaster, you know, stories from the underground, you know, the people who've lost out and you have this parade of people who have lost out as a result of this legislative change. | |
| And of course they don't show all the people who've won because the people who've won are like, wow, I guess I can afford health care insurance. | |
| That's nice. But that's not as compelling a story as somebody who's lost health care insurance or lost some access to health care as a result of changed legislation. | |
| And so if they can get you to make Decisions based upon individual stories rather than general principles, i.e. | |
| freedom, free market, and so on, is better and sustainable. | |
| Then they're completely in control of you, right? | |
| Then the media can just push and pull these narratives. | |
| Like you always hear these politicians say, you know, in a truck stop in Nevada last week, I met a man and that man said to me, Hamana, Hamana, Hamana, and everyone's like, wow, ooh, ooh, goosebumps, right? | |
| Because that's an individual story rather than general principles. | |
| If there are general principles, you can make sensible decisions based on ethics. | |
| If it's individual stories, you're completely open to whatever narrative the media wants to push. | |
| If it was individual stories, the West never would have ended slavery. | |
| You can almost find a slave who's worse off after the end of slavery. | |
| Somebody who, you know, this man used to live in a nice house with his slave owner and now he lives under a bridge because he can't find a job and he's sick. | |
| So you can't ever make decisions based on individual stories because that's for persons, that's for charities, that's for churches, that's for individuals and family members and friends to all evaluate. | |
| But this pumping up of individual stories, you know, like the kid on the beach in Turkey, will always lead you to be open to being controlled. | |
| Now, McCain, too. I mean, McCain has his reasons, I suppose. | |
| But all you need to know, like, there's this wonderful thing in the free market called price, which tells you a huge amount of information that's not available in any other context. | |
| You can't get it through central planning. | |
| Now, price is fantastic and fascinating. | |
| It tells you about supply. | |
| It tells you about demand. | |
| It tells you about cost. It tells you about efficiency. | |
| It tells you about profitability. | |
| It tells you an enormous amount. | |
| If prices are very high for a good, it's like, ooh, there's a lot of profit there. | |
| We should go in there and we should compete. | |
| It tells you if prices are low, maybe we should exit this market. | |
| It tells you a huge amount of what's going on. | |
| Now, the media, the mainstream media throughout the West, provides a wonderful, wonderful service free of charge. | |
| And this wonderful service, free of charge, is the Traitor Meter. | |
| Now, the Traitor Meter, it tells you how much a public figure is committed to freedom or to coercion, if they're committed to a market or government force, if they're committed to your liberties or your enslavement. | |
| And the Traitor Meter is actually very simple. | |
| If the media likes that person, high on the traitor meter. | |
| If the media dislikes that person, high on the your ally in the future fight for freedom meter. | |
| That's a bit long, I suppose, but you get what I'm saying. | |
| And so the fact that when... | |
| Last year when Donald Trump said about John McCain, you know, I prefer people who weren't captured. | |
| You know, being captured doesn't win a war. | |
| And the media immediately rushed to his defense and oh, you know, this is terrible and he's a hero and so on. | |
| And that's all you need to know. | |
| That's the price signal. | |
| Of corruptibility that the media is sending you. | |
| Whoever the media is rushing to defend is an enemy to you, your future and your freedoms. | |
| It's a very very simple metric and so far I found it to be 100% reliable. | |
| So yeah, this is where things are. | |
| The Democrats thirst for power and control and therefore almost exclusively vote along party lines. | |
| And the Republicans, a lot of them thirst for power and control, but some of them do have some principles which means there are fragments and fracturing Now, because the unity of power lust unites the Democrats and the smattering of principles among the Republicans shatters their unity and causes them to recoil from the inevitable compromises of legislative agendas, it means that the Democrats have an edge, especially when the Republicans have a slim majority. | |
| But the failure of this, to me, I don't know. | |
| An argument could be made, and I think it's a good argument, that this is a positive. | |
| Because if you reform something, you own it. | |
| Now, the fact that The Obamacare mandate has blown a big giant hole in the size of the federal budget. | |
| And it's, you know, currently leaking cash, like some godforsaken ship at Pearl Harbor, means that with Obamacare continuing in its current form, the opportunities for tax relief is very low, particularly for the middle class tax relief. | |
| Medium high income earners 150k to 300k is already not there and will go the other way, but even middle class people are unlikely to see any tax reforms or repeals given the continuance of Obamacare. | |
| But Obamacare isn't going to work, it is going to fail, and it is going to fail in a horrible ghastly manner. | |
| And the fact that it has continued in its current form means that the failure and the repeal opportunities will be greater down the road if people hold to their principles. | |
| I know that's a little dicey, and of course there are a lot of people's healthcare on the line, and I understand that. | |
| And the individual stories thing, too. | |
| I mean, if you see somebody who's not got access to healthcare, send them some money, help them out. | |
| I would. I mean, good lord, just be charitable. | |
| You don't need to run to the government every single time. | |
| But the fact that it's failed means that the crash is going to be even more spectacular, which means the opportunities to go in not just a different direction, but the opposite direction, back towards freedom, back towards deregulation, that opportunity remains enormously strong. | |
| It was kind of a mutant compromise this skinny repeal bill and of course Mitch McConnell just dumped it mere hours before the vote was cast so people didn't have much of a chance to review it. | |
| I mean it's a god-awful process and the idea that millions of people's health care and future and opportunities and debts and taxes Rest on the tumor-infected brain of one old octogenarian. | |
| It's just a weird system, right? | |
| I mean, it's a weird system. | |
| And this is why centralization of these kinds of powerful decisions is always such a disaster. | |
| Decentralization and freedom is the way to go forward. | |
| And you know the old saying, the harder... | |
| Something falls, the higher it might bounce back. | |
| And as Obamacare crashes, the opportunities for freedom may present themselves in a way that weren't available at the moment. | |
| That's, I think, all we can cross our fingers and hope for. | |
| This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedomain Radio. |
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