I sell health insurance. I think that it is something that is needed by most families in America. However, I do not support the notion that health care should be a "right" as does President Obama.

Get Government out of health care - period. Remove all restrictions, licensing requirements, and regulations, and it will work just fine. I promise.

The fundamental reason why the health care system in the U.S. is failing is due to Government regulation. Regulation born out of an irrational desire to transfer self-responsibility from the individual to a "protective group" (i.e. Government bureaucracy) has destroyed our health care system. It has turned insurance companies into agents of the Government using them to redistribute wealth.

Obama would have you believe that over 40 million Americans are uninsured because they just cannot afford insurance (i.e. that insurance companies, through their greed, have created a system that is unaffordable to a growing number of Americans). The reality is just the opposite. As I will reference in a moment, many of the 40 million uninsured make above average incomes and choose not to carry insurance.

Those who truly cannot afford health insurance already qualify for existing subsidized programs like Medicaid (which incidentally increase the cost of general health insurance by not paying the entire claim owed to the hospitals and doctors for services rendered). The cold, hard, painful truth is that it is the Government, not privately owned insurance companies, that have made insurance unaffordable.

I suspect what the Government is trying to do is a redistribution of health, by attempting to evade the reality that some folks are simply uninsurable. But by pretending that they are healthy enough to be underwritten, the Govenrment actually tries to make the unhealthy healthy causing an increase in everyone's health insurance premiums. As explained in an timeless article from "The Free Market":

Because a person's health, or lack of it, lies increasingly within his own control, many, if not most health risks, are actually uninsurable. "Insurance" against risks whose likelihood an individual can systematically influence falls within that person's own responsibility.

All insurance, moreover, involves the pooling of individual risks. It implies that insurers pay more to some and less to others. But no one knows in advance, and with certainty, who the "winners" and "losers" will be. "Winners" and "losers" are distributed randomly, and the resulting income redistribution is unsystematic. If "winners" or "losers" could be systematically predicted, "losers" would not want to pool their risk with "winners," but with other "losers," because this would lower their insurance costs. I would not want to pool my personal accident risks with those of professional football players, for instance, but exclusively with those of people in circumstances similar to my own, at lower costs.

Because of legal restrictions on the health insurers' right of refusal--to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable--the present health-insurance system is only partly concerned with insurance. The industry cannot discriminate freely among different groups' risks.

As a result, health insurers cover a multitude of uninnsurable risks, alongside, and pooled with, genuine insurance risks. They do not discriminate among various groups of people which pose significantly different insurance risks. The industry thus runs a system of income redistribution--benefiting irresponsible actors and high-risk groups at the expense of responsible individuals and low risk groups. Accordingly the industry's prices are high and ballooning.

What about all of those people who are poor, yet healthy, and yet "can't afford" health insurance? Read the top ten myths about healthcare. That should dramatically clear things up for you.

What about the claim that health care is a right? A right is a freedom of action in a social context, such as the freedom of speech. Health care, while needed, is not a right. There can be no such thing as a right to health care because rights are not automatic claims on another individual or business's property.

Just as there is no right to owning a car, or a home, or the newest video game, or a Macintosh computer, or the right to ice cream in the summer or snow plowing in the winter - so too there can be no right to force your employer (or society) to pay for your health care services. And, you do not have the right to force an insurance company to give you an insurance policy or a right to force a doctor to treat you.

This also works in reverse: no one has a right to force you to work for them, or for you to sell them any goods you produce or services you provide.

Needs are not rights. Needs are needs, and they must be fulfilled by applying reason to the problem of survival - in other words they must be fulfilled by your own productive efforts.

To adopt the notion that needs create rights is to pervert the principle of justice and negate the notion of individual rights, freedom, and liberty - the foundation on which America was created.

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