Posted on 12/10/2013 11:50:41 AM PST by Kaslin
The late, great Milton Friedman used to say, there's no such thing as a free lunch. The ancient Romans had another pointed saying: "Quod erat demonstrandum," meaning, roughly, remember now what I told you, doofus?
To put it another way, is there room for surprise in the report that high deductibles may contribute to making Obamacare something less than the divine blessing its authors meant it to be? For all the comforting promises out of D.C., relayed to the general public with profound sweetness, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always pays. To believe otherwise is a) to believe money grows on trees, or b) not to care, so long as someone else picks up the check.
Obamacare's underlying philosophy is b ). In other words, a Democratic Congress, at the instigation of the White House, planned all along that good old Peter would pay Paul in the name of good old income redistribution.
Quod erat demonstrandum. According to a comparative study by HealthPocket Inc., there's a reason bottom-of-the-line "bronze" plans sold under Obamacare are bottom-of-the-line. You pay less up front in purchasing one of these plans because the real costs come later. In all but two of the 36 states participating in the federally run marketplace, the average individual deductible is $5,0812 a year. This compares with an average of $3,589 in 2013. The "typical" cost of a baby born through normal delivery -- $6,150 -- "would be almost entirely an out-of-pocket expense for a person holding a bronze policy" with deductible at that level, explains the Wall Street Journal.
You might, at certain income levels, receive federal help for premiums or deductibles. That still leaves hundreds of thousands of us, as the Journal notes, faced with the Hobson's choice of buying a higher-cost policy -- "silver" or "gold" or "platinum" -- or scraping by with less medical care to avoid unreimbursed services.
It is not that Congress and the White House invented deductibles -- ceilings underneath which the client pays before reaching the level at which the insurance company payments kick in. The pretense here was all along that Obamacare would level access to health care, the federal government, with its superior knowledge, figuring out the level of necessary care. The White House's steady, on-message assurances that we could keep our existing doctors and hospital plans were designed as white noise to drown out concerns about the true cost.
A society bred up since the 1960s to understand government "benefits" as magically paid for by magical "others" was supposed to look the other way as D.C. passed the hat to the middle class types that Democrats always portray as oppressed.
Boy, are they oppressed now, bearing upon their backs nearly the whole burden of funding Obamacare in the absence of enough "millionaires and billionaires" to make the program possible. Who took away the free lunch?
Consumers who formerly were entitled to shop around for the premium-deductible combination that best suited their needs and pocketbooks have been told -- the truth is on the table at last -- to shut up and do things the government's way. Consumers can't even abstain from purchasing a policy. Big Brother has his eye on them -- the doofuses who doubted his free-lunch promises all along, as well as those who gobbled each promise with chocolate sauce.
No economist ever spoke more inspirationally than Friedman in behalf of choice as the key ingredient in the free market pie. We choose at the risk of being wrong, as also on the hope, the expectation of being right; such was his notion.
"Free" never meant privileged to walk the check at the house's expense. It meant free to work and plan and plan and work. The present White House doesn't much care for either of those avenues of personal expression. The present White House can do the planning, thanks, and announce the results.
Work? There's another foreign concept. Maybe the "1 percent" can do whatever we need. We get that impression, don't we?
What liberalism thrives on. Sheeperals get to feel good about themselves for their activism and advocacy, and someone else gets the bill. Of course, this time, some of them are getting the bill. And they are best described as "confused" in their responses.
Would you be interested in posting up the story at the top over on hotair.com, about the Cuccinelli path to victory by way of the late term abortion issue. VERY interesting voter response stats. Thx, Rita
Oops, profound embarrass, here. Meant that post to go by freepmail. So sorry.
Friedman also said, “If there ain’t any, no one gets any.”
“Quod erat demonstrandum,” meaning, roughly, remember now what I told you, doofus?
Doesn’t it mean: thus it is proven?
This irritates me, sorry.
The earliest known occurrence of the full phrase, in the form “There ain’t no such thing as free lunch”, appears as the punchline of a joke related in an article in the El Paso Herald-Post of June 27, 1938, entitled “Economics in Eight Words”.[9] In 1945, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” appeared in the Columbia Law Review, and “there is no free lunch” appeared in a 1942 article in the Oelwein Daily Register (in a quote attributed to economist Harley L. Lutz) and in a 1947 column by economist Merryle S. Rukeyser.[2][10] In 1949, the phrase appeared in an article by Walter Morrow in the San Francisco News (published on 1 June) and in Pierre Dos Utt’s monograph TANSTAAFL: A Plan for a New Economic World Order,[11] which describes an oligarchic political system based on his conclusions from “no free lunch” principles.
That’s quite the history - that must come under the heading of Solomon’s old saying: “nothing new under the sun.”
I like the one sometimes attributed to Abe Lincoln that. “A nation divided cannot stand”.
It’s in the Book of Daniel and maybe before even that. That I’m aware of, old Abe didn’t try to claim it as his own, it’s just that he was very familar with the bible.
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