Leading up to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I was one of the more than 40 million uninsured Americans ... and I didn't mind it that way. Individuals have the right to pursue health care coverage should they desire. To legislatively mandate coverage, however, goes against the fundamental idea that Americans possess the right and responsibility to determine their own destinies. The arguments against the passage of the senate's health care legislation have continued to reverberate throughout the media and the public. That is occurring despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's assertion that the bill would be, "making history, making progress, and restoring the American dream." As many Americans realize, Pelosi's words are deceiving. The passage of the bill creates a very real possibility that Congress's dream of health care reform will serve as a transition to a socialist nightmare. Congress has just placed one-sixth of our national economy on life support. The only question is, When are they going to pull the plug?
The struggle over national health care insurance reform has lasted roughly a full year with the House Democrats triumphantly passing the senate version of the bill on Sunday night, March 21. Despite the Democratic Party's overwhelming majority in both houses of congress, at times it appeared that the push for health care reform would not be successful. One of the primary reasons the bill was able to gain the support needed to pass was due to a report issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), stating that despite the bill's almost $1 trillion price-tag, during the next 10 years the bill will supposedly bring down the federal budget deficit.
House Democrats that originally opposed the senate version of the bill would have proven wise to maintain their opposition - the justifications for their policy shift prove economically weak. Just two short years after the beginning of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Americans have already forgotten the federal government's role in creating the financial meltdown. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are two quasi-private financial organizations overseen by congress that played a key role in creating the economic disaster. Prompted by Congress as part of its attempt to extend mortgage loans to lower income families, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac inadvertently encouraged the spread of subprime lending. As chair of the House Financial Services committee, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Ma., stated in 2003, "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role in helping make housing more affordable, both in general through leveraging the mortgage market, and in particular, they have a mission that this Congress has given them ... to focus on affordable housing." At the peak of this secondary lending initiative, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac held or guaranteed more than 50 percent of U.S. mortgages.
As can be seen by the subsequent economic collapse, congress's attempt to use the mortgage industry to socially engineer the housing market had disastrous consequences for the world economy. Likewise, the federal government regrettably allowed the American taxpayer to foot the bill for bailing-out congress's pet financial institutions. So the question now beceomes, Have we learned anything? There is absolutely no difference between congress's utopian attempt to extend the American dream of owning a home and its attempt to expand the supposed right to health care. In both instances, Congress is attempting to shape the national condition to fit the model it deems appropriate. Congress possesses neither the responsibility, nor the prerogative, to determine the structure of the housing market or the health care market. What's more, as the 2008 economic crisis demonstrated, when congress does attempt to manipulate the economy as a means of social engineering, economic ruin almost inevitably results.
The American public should never have allowed the passage of this disastrous health care bill. As Pelosi humorously trumpeted before the vote on the bill, "Just think - we will be joining those who established Social Security, Medicare, and now tonight health care for all Americans." If Pelosi is proud of joining the ranks of the short-sighted politicians who formulated the inefficient pay-as-you-go Social Security and Medicare systems, the American public is in even more dire straits than can be imagined. Maybe someone should inform Pelosi that the programs she holds up as the beacons of American governmental benevolence are projected to become insolvent by 2037 and 2017, respectively. In the wake of those alarming predictions, we cannot afford to wait for Obama's supposed deficit savings.
Obama may have been the purveyor of change in the 2008 election, but the security he is promising by signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is only false hope. The focus on health care reform serves as merely a distraction from the true crisis of Medicare and Social Security that is on the horizon. Despite what the CBO may project, America simply cannot afford this bill. Congress's latest attempt at health care reform will fail. So now we must ask, Will our government revoke the bill or will the market kill the legislation? The CBO gave the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act the economic green light, but remember, even Bernie Madoff's operation looked good on paper.
Ginny Robinson' s column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. \nShe can be reached at\ng.robinson@cavalierdaily.com.
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