Rush Limbaugh and Bad Healthcare Ideas

Editor’s Note:

I apologize for the recent lack of posts. I am in the process of finishing up a novel and will be back to my old big mouth self in a few months. 

As Republicans decide if they will run Rush Limbaugh for President, there are some who believe the winger rhetoric is destructive. There are others who believe the thrashing in the last two elections was not their absolutist attitudes but the presentation of conservative principles. They think conservative ideas are better. 

One of the ideas presented at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention last week was a conservative solution to healthcare. They actually stopped saying “government run” long enough to explain their stance. They feel the problem is access to insurance. They tell us health insurance should not stop at the state border. They want to allow insurance companies to cross state lines to allow larger groups. They believe plumbers, engineers and others will form groups not available to them within state lines. 

Conservatives may want to rethink this idea because it may have some decidedly unconservative consequences. 

One of the consequences will be taking local and state control away insurance regulation. As state barriers are removed, state insurance commissions will no longer have jurisdiction. Local regulation and governance has been one of the cornerstones of conservative thought. Conservatives usually tell us people are governed better locally and not by Washington. This idea also ignores one of the biggest traumas in recent American life.

Americans still have blood in their mouth from the last free market fat lip. Many Americans blame the current recession on unregulated financial markets. With that in mind, do conservatives really believe Americans will allow an industry they distrust already to be unregulated? Who do conservatives believe will enforce health insurance portability? Another decidedly unconservative consequence of this idea might be a new national regulation directly from Washington. That sounds like government run healthcare to me. 

In their haste to bring alternative ideas, conservatives have not done their homework. Again, they have gone out of their way to have a free market like solution. At the end of the day, the ramifications of their proposals are not even true to conservative ideals.  

Wouldn’t it be better to give Americans an opportunity to buy national healthcare insurance from the government and leave private insurance alone? Maybe conservatives are afraid private insurance can’t compete. Who knows? We might just find current insurance providers really don’t need increases in premiums at three times the rate of inflation.