Ahead of the Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling on Obamacare, Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul explained that government is already too involved in health care.
The one-time presidential candidate, who practiced medicine before becoming a congressman, had harsh words for the Affordable Care Act.
“It is obvious that Obamacare’s legal apologists either are wholly ignorant of constitutional principles, or wholly lawless in their blatant disregard for those principles,” Paul wrote on his online feed, “Texas Straight Talk.”
“Likewise, supporters of Obamacare are willfully ignorant of basic economics. The fundamental problem with health care costs in America is that the doctor-patient relationship has been profoundly altered by third party interference. Third parties, either government agencies themselves or nominally private insurance companies virtually forced upon us by government policies, have not only destroyed doctor-patient confidentiality. They also inescapably drive up costs because basic market disciplines — supply and demand, price sensitivity, and profit signals — are destroyed … Obamacare, via its insurance mandate, is more of the same misdiagnosis.”
The Texas congressman went on to quote Gabriel Vidal, Chief Operating Officer of a U.S. hospital system who dismissed Obamacare back in 2009. Vidal stated, “Obama uses faulty logic to diagnose the problem.”
Paul quoted Vidal to point out the flawed pricing that occurs when a third party is involved.
“No matter how accurate the cost data, how well intentioned and how sophisticated [the] computer program … The just price of a health service can only be determined by the voluntary exchange of a patient with his hospital, physician, and pharmacist,” Vidal explained. “The relationship between the patient and his private provider has been corrupted by the intrusion of government and its intermediaries (HMOs, for example) to such an extent that we can no longer speak of a relationship that can produce meaningful pricing information.”
“Absent such pricing information,” Paul wrote, “our system increasingly resembles socialist systems with centralized price setting, shortages, rationing, apathy, and declining quality of care.”
Paul rejects plans for “a single payer government health care system” as well as plans that would maintain the status quo.
What’s Ron Paul’s plan?
He wrote, “What America needs is a rejection of all government systems in favor of free market mechanisms.”