Thursday, September 10, 2009

Public Option Insurance Plan, or Slush Fund for Politicians?

I watched Obama's speech about health care reform and I'm still amazed that the politicians don't get that the majority of taxpayers are against new programs that would increase the tax burden. So I'm watching the speech, wondering what their motivation is for passing a bill that is so obviously unpopular to so many people.

Then it occurred to me to think along business lines, instead of from a political point of view. A public health care bill, that included a public option insurance program, would essentially create a government run insurance company. I've written about insurance companies before and about how they practically print money, since they have tremendous inflows of cash. Normal insurance companies invest this money to produce even more profits, before having to cover any payouts to policy holders or investors. What do you suppose a government bureaucracy would do with such a tremendous amount of cash?

In the case of Social Security, they raided the Social Security fund to pay for pork barrel projects and garner support from special interest groups. They replaced the money in the Social Security Trust Fund with government IOU's, in the form of Treasury notes, which are paid off by taxpayers. So, they subtract money from our paychecks to fund Social Security, borrow that money to fund other projects, then increase taxes to pay off the IOU's, for the money they borrowed from taxpayers in the first place. I'm sure this helps them raise a lot of contributions for their re-election campaigns, but are they looking out for the interests of the average taxpayer? I don't think so.

So now they're trying to pass a public option insurance plan and create a huge bureaucracy with tremendous cash inflows. Does anybody really believe that this money will be used only for health care for the poor? I don't. I think it's more likely to be seen by politicians as one great big slush fund, which will undoubtedly lead to even more runaway spending at the taxpayers expense.

If this bill is passed, which it looks as though it will be, then at the very least, safeguards should be put in to place to prevent politicians from raiding the money taken in for health care. I doubt that this will happen. I think the best that we can hope for is, taxpayers will see through the slick talking politicians and vote them out of office.

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