Why should anybody be forced to pay for health care through insurance? If my doctor wants to make me feel better for a few bucks and I’m willing to pay it, why should that not be legal?

Some have questioned whether the US Constitution would even allow requiring health care.

No, it’s not the same thing as auto insurance. The only thing the state requires is liability insurance. You have to be able to pay if you damage someone else’s property.

There is no law – and there never should be – requiring anyone to carry collision insurance. I haven’t for years. If I bend my car, I pay to fix it. Driving older cars, it’s cheaper than paying a premium.

Obama has said several times over the years, though he now says otherwise, that he wants a “single-pay” system.

But it’s precisely because “someone else” was paying the bills that the costs have gone through the ceiling. The way to return common sense to the pricing mechanism is to put the consumer back in control.

Another huge contributor to escalating costs is trial lawyers who promise quick riches by suing for malpractice whenever anyone has a health issue, whether or not the provider is to blame.

This causes doctors to order tons of needless tests just to cover their back sides. It also contributes heavily to their malpractice insurance premiums. I have heard of premiums as high as $200,000 a year for a single doctor.

Guess who pays that premium, boys and girls. We do.

Obama dipped his toe in the water of tort reform in his address, but just barely.

He didn’t take the lead but he did ask Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to look into it. She said she’ll get right on it.

But two bits says it doesn’t go any further than that. The trial lawyers are major contributors to both sides, but particularly to the Democrats. Will they stand up to

 

land.”

Then President Obama followed up a couple of nights later in his prime time address to Congress when he said the only way government-controlled health insurance could work is if “everybody” is involved.

Sound familiar?

We feared Communism for years in this country precisely because it said Communism could not succeed unless the entire world were Communist and that could only come about through “violent revolution.” That means war and, to us through much of the 20th Century, that spelled World War III, not a pleasant thought.

Clearly, the fastest way to solve our health care “crisis” is to return to a fee-for-service system. I’ve been told we can never put that “genie back in the bottle.” But we should be moving in that direction – not to more insurance and certainly not to more government. That’s what got us into trouble in the first place.

We hear so often that the only person who can get health insurance and chooses not to is a “24-year-old who thinks he isn’t going to get sick.”

Scuse me. What about the guy who has worked hard all his life and has enough resources to pay for his own health care? Why should he be forced to pay a premium for anything?

By JIM STREET

Ed & Pub

After all the debate in the last several weeks about government health care “reform,” my blood started to boil a bit when I read of a proposal by Sen. Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana last week. His $826 billon plan would levy stiff fines on anyone who doesn’t get health insurance.

“Calm down,” I told myself. “This is just a proposal. It has a long way to go before it becomes the law of the