Republicans: Don’t wuss out on health care!
May 20th, 2008 | by Brian Schwartz |
Here’s my take on Republicans: they give lip service to individual rights, freedom, and free-markets, but when it comes to legislation, it’s Socialism-lite. Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek said as much in his 1960 essay “Why I am not a Conservative” :
…the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.
It’s still happening, as Dick Army laments in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal :
While the Democratic Party appears unified under the banner of big-government health care, the GOP seems conflicted and running scared. This is a classic case of Republicans being afraid that the public will not understand good policy reforms. Rather than promoting the principles of consumer choice, individual responsibility and provider competition that would transform our broken health-care system, key Republicans are bowing to political pressure and signing on with the government-run health-care Democrats. …
I believe the American people will reward innovative, principled leadership on health care. A rational, conservative solution to rising health-care costs gets the government and other third parties out of our health-care business. Both our families and the GOP can win by expanding Health Savings Accounts, by allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, by doing away with tax policies that encourage third-party payment systems, and by embracing health-care price disclosure.
Colorado State Representative Cory Gardner and other supporters of HB 1327 had the right idea about buying insurance across state lines.
(via Health Care BS )
