Health Care: Republicans and Conservatives Can’t Win on Policy if They Don’t Engage in the Fight

It’s not rocket science — Republicans and conservatives can’t win on policy if they don’t reach enough people — this article first posted six years ago today:

The political left wing in this country has it easy when it comes to any issue — they need only tell people that government can take care of it for you. It doesn’t matter what the “it” is, there’s no explanation needed for what they’re selling. They merely have to offer a larger and more intrusive government and wala! — the problem is solved. Except it never is solved and it’s usually made worse. Fortunately for leftists and Democrats there are plenty of ignorant and gullible people in the land to keep supporting the Dems and their failed liberal plans.

Remember Hillarycare? Twenty years ago the debate over whether to give control of health care to the government began in earnest here in the U.S. That means Republicans and conservatives had the larger part of two decades to explain to the American public a better way to reform the health care system. I don’t know anyone who thought reforms weren’t needed — and I bet few people ever heard from Republicans and conservatives about their proposals.

This is why I keep writing about outreach to the uninformed. The failure of our side continues to result in the kind of serious damage that’s being done right now, for example, with the rollout of Obamacare. The tragedy is that the damage was avoidable had Republicans and conservatives been serious about winning hearts and minds over to the right way of fixing the health care system.

As long as the system is dominated by third party payers there will be no functioning market and prices will continue to increase faster than they should. When insurance companies pay the bill few patients need to concern themselves with the price. With this there’s no incentive for proper cost control and price competition is out the window.

We don’t get our car insurance through our employer and similarly we shouldn’t get our health insurance through our employer. Insurance is supposed to be for covering big repairs, not every day things like oil changes. While we have a long road to travel to get back to where we need to be, in the interim there are conservative steps that can be quickly taken to alleviate a lot of the pre- and post-Obamacare health care world.

Republicans had a chance to implement reforms when they held the congress and the White House and they failed to get it done. Now we’ve got an even bigger mess to clean up. Markets aren’t perfect but they fill the store shelves with products and people have a chance to improve their standard of living. When you allow government to be involved more than it should — supply and quality goes down while prices go up. If we limited government’s involvement and regulated the arena properly we’d see in health care what we see in the market all the time: supply and quality rises while prices drop.

Click here and here for a few recent examples of the kind of information that doesn’t see much daylight. Our side has to get into the mass communications business and everyone (as I keep saying) has a role to play since everyone and every group (large or small) has the ability to reach the uninformed.

Up next: School reform is a no-brainer.

Image credit: www.selffundingmagazine.com.