Insurance is a concept that has communal roots. The idea is to pool the money of the community so that if any need help, they can pull funds from the community pool to take care of a cost they may not have been able to take care of on their own. However, if you break down insurance to its most simplest terms, it is no different than what the early colonists tried in Jamestown and Plymouth with a communal storage, where folks grew what they could and put it in the communal storage, pulling out what they need as they needed it. The communal concept failed and colonists starved as a result. It wasn't until they changed the system to where it was up to each individual to take care of themselves, and then if they had surplus, they could take it to a free market, that the colonists began to prosper.
The health care industry in America was at its best, and prices were at their lowest, when the communal concept of insurance companies were minimally influential. Some of the wealthiest Americans had insurance, but the middle class and lower class of the economic scale maintained personal relationships with their doctors. To win the business of individuals, the medical industry competed as does any other kind of business system. The doctors kept prices as low as they could, carried in house loan programs, and kept the quality of care as high as possible, including providing house calls. When insurance became mandated by government, government screwed up the health care system, because the patient/provider relationship was no longer a key component in the industry, and insurance companies were given a way to manipulate the industry. The deep pockets of insurance companies drove up costs, and doctors largely abandoned the concept of high quality of care for the patients because who they had to satisfy now was the insurance companies. As the quality of care went down, and the cost of procedures was driven ever higher, insurance companies began to dictate the rules, and lawsuits began to emerge, forcing doctors to guard against malpractice litigation against them. The court costs, cost of malpractice insurance, and the tendency by the medical industry to ensure every procedure is used whether it is needed or not to protect against arguments that may say the doctor didn't check "every" possibility (in order to protect themselves from litigation) created a dynamic that became a vicious cycle. The higher costs and protections fed against each other, pushing costs higher and higher, until any chance of a patient/provider relationship ever returning became impossible because health care had just become way too expensive. The problem was becoming irreversible, so was the cost of insurance.
Statists in the American federal government decided it was time to fix what was broken. The way they decided to fix it was to add yet another intruder upon the industry. The insurance industry was causing enough damage as it was. The third party payer being involved had created the mess we were in. Yet, President Barack Obama, and his minions, believed that inserting government would somehow be helpful, plus allow government to take over the reins when it came to the ability to manipulate the industry. Now, however, the manipulation was not for higher monetary gains, but for political power, and pushing a statist agenda that has set its crosshairs on eliminating individual markets, and individual choices.
The damage being caused by the federal government inserting itself through the Affordable Care Act was not only making an already damaged system function in an even worse manner (driving up costs and confusing the already complex nature of the industry), but federal government influence is also unconstitutional. There is no place in the Constitution that authorizes the government to involve itself in the health care industry. There is no express power granted in Article I, Section 8, or any subsequent amendment.
Government inserting itself into the industry is unconstitutional, and from the point of view of the Founding Fathers, ill-advised.
“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come
when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict
the art of healing to one class of Men and deny equal privileges to
others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a Special
privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom.”
― Benjamin Rush
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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