Paul Krugman writes:
Never mind the polls showing approval of Obamacare moving one way or the other; they are all being taken in an environment where people are amazingly ignorant about the law, with a large minority believing that it has been repealed. What matters is how the thing works — and that, in turn, depends crucially on sufficient numbers of young, currently uninsured people signing up for the exchanges. Advocates will try to get those people signed up; Republicans will try to convince them not to.
Translation: “Pay no attention to those polls showing how unpopular Obamacare is; people just don’t like it because they don’t understand how wonderful it is going to be for them!”
Krugman is reiterating a theme also used by his editors, as I commented on before:
The New York Times editors rather humorously blame Republicans for the fact that “More than half of Americans still say they don’t know how they and their families will be affected by the Affordable Care Act”, a.k.a. Obamacare.
So, you see, Americans just don’t understand how great Obamacare is going to be for them. If they don’t know that yet, it isn’t because the law so complex — and it is extremely complex; in fact, it is so complex, that the Obama administration “recently announced it will pay $67 million to more than 100 community groups and health care providers to evangelize for the program and help people navigate its complexities in preparation for the opening of health care exchanges on Oct. 1.”
But, no, it isn’t the fault of the law’s “complexities” that explains Americans’ failure to understand how it will affect them; it isn’t the fact that it consists of thousands of pages of regulations. It’s just those damn Republicans.
Of course, Krugman charges that the Republicans are dissuading people from loving Obamacare by deceiving them about how wonderful it is going to be for them. Trouble is, Krugman himself demonstrably attempts to deceive his readers about it, as I’ve also previously discussed, most recently here.
Regardless of the dishonesty from politicians and partisan pundits, isn’t Obamacare going to be wonderful? No, it isn’t. One, violating individuals’ liberty with unconstitutional laws implemented through the use or threat of force can never be “wonderful”, and, two, intervening even more heavily into the market ostensibly to “solve” problems created in the first place by government intervention in the market is not wisdom. It rather fits Einstein’s definition of “insanity”. Obamacare does nothing to actually address the underlying causes of why health care is so unaffordable, it just tries to shift costs around in ways that can only exacerbate the problem.
So what’s a better solution?
Actually address the underlying problems in health care, and work to fix rather than to further institutionalize them.
Allow the medical professionals in the industry to do their jobs as they see fit rather than being dictated to by government bureaucrats how their jobs should be done.
Allow individuals to make their own choices about which care providers will best meet their needs rather than outlawing competition and limiting consumer choices.
Allow voluntary exchanges in the marketplace for health care for mutual benefit rather than using government force to get consumers to behave the way a bunch of idiot bureaucrats think they should.
Allow the market’s pricing system to work so there can be real prices in health care, rather than trying to manipulate prices through government intervention such that they become meaningless (or nonexistent for consumers).
By doing so, allow prices to serve their important function of helping to instruct where to invest capital to most efficiently direct scarce resources towards productive ends, rather than succumbing to the delusion that a group of bureaucrats in Washington using force know better than millions of individuals acting of their own free well in the marketplace how best to direct those resources.
Allow the productive ends towards which capital is invested be determined by consumer demand rather than politicians who believe not in liberty and free markets but in government oppression and a command-and-control economy.
