The health system that we have in the United States is the best health system in the world. That does not mean that there are not problems. There are problems with the delivery of our health system. The problems are generally the result of too much government involved in the health delivery system, not the lack of government involvement. What I mean by that is that the government requires things that are unreasonable which drives up the costs of health care for everyone. The government then claims that the costs are too high and puts new regulations on the system which drive up the costs further.

The health system does need some reform. The Democrats are crafting their version of reform. The preliminary information coming out about their version of reform is frightening. It sounds innocent on the surface, until you realize that there is a hidden time bomb that will destroy the entire system within a few years. Let’s look at their plan and see if we can see the time bomb.

The plan as I understand it is that everyone will be required to have health insurance. That insurance will be required to be supplied by your employer, even if you are a part-time employee. If the employer decides not to provide the health insurance, the employer will have to pay a “penalty” (tax) to provide for the people who do not have health insurance from their employer. People will be able to choose from health insurance from private insurers or a government option. That is the time bomb. The health insurance companies have to make a profit. The government does not have to make a profit. What this means is that over time, people will move to the government option because it is cheaper. Also, the health insurance companies will have a cap on what they can earn. That will mean a quicker loss of insurers.

Once all the health insurance companies are out of business, we will have only the government option and have a single-payer system. This will take a few years to fully take place. The beauty of this time period is that it does take time. That will mean that the people in the country will get used to the government option before it fully is implemented. That way when it is the only option, people will be used to it and will not complain. When health care rationing finally hits, there will be no place to go. All of the health insurance companies will be out of business and the only place to turn will be the government.

Right now, with our current system, we are looking at a doctor shortage in the next 10-15 years. We currently have about 800,000 doctors and will require about 1.5-3 million by 2030. At our current rate of turnover and replacement, we would not have anywhere near that number by 2030. If we have a single-payer system, the current crop of doctors will retire faster than expected. Also, the number of people seeking to become doctors will go down as their hope of a good income goes down. Under a single-payer system, doctors become government employees and that limits what they will make. Countries with single-payer systems have severe doctor shortages. Also the quality of doctors in those countries has declined since implementing single-payer systems. The quality of people seeking to become doctors has declined in the medical schools in those countries, so the quality of doctors turned out goes down as well. That can be expected to happen here.

A shortage of doctors will mean a shortage of medical care for patients. There will also be an increase in the number of people seeking medical attention, since medical care is “free”. That means medical care will be rationed, especially for difficult medical situations. Also the amount of medical innovation will go down. There will be no incentive to create new and better ways of doing things. There will be no way to compensate anyone for creating new ways of doing things. New medicines will be slow in coming on the market as the cost of creating the medicine is high and the amount of money they will receive in return is low. As a result, the medical care in the country will decline a lot.

The actual way to solve this problem is to get the government out of the way. Right now, the government involvement in medical care is nearly invisible. By removing this government involvement, we can reduce the cost to the consumer. That will mean more people will be able to afford medical insurance. Not everyone will want medical insurance. Some people will want to self-insure. They have enough money to pay for medical care without needing insurance. Some people believe they do not need it right now as they are healthy and young. Let them do what they want, it is their lives. Most states have health insurance for people who cannot afford health insurance. In Arizona, it is called AHCCCS (Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System). All in all, this is a good system.

The only problem with our current system is that government requires certain things be contained in all policies within a state. That drives up the cost of insurance for all. We should be able to choose what things we want included in our policies like we do for auto insurance. In fact, if we ran health insurance more like we do auto insurance we would have lower costs and more people insured. We should look into some sort of an auto/health insurance hybrid to solve the problem of affordability. We do not need the ticking time bomb that the Democrats are cooking up in Congress and Obama wants passed in the next month. Let’s wait a year or two and come up with something good. Let’s not rush into something we will regret like we already regret GM and Chrysler.

The second of the three disasters that are facing our country is the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine. The other two are the appointment of the Supreme Court Justice and the destruction of the best medical system in the world.

The “Fairness Doctrine” was in place for a long time. It required radio stations to balance talk shows. If they had a show with a conservative opinion, they had to balance that with a liberal show. As a result, radio stations were not willing to take the risk over the determination if they had met the standard. They just did not have talk shows that dealt with political speech at all.

Ronald Reagan came along and said that was not acceptable. The First Amendment to the Constitution says that there shall be no law abridging Freedom of Speech. Since this law obviously did just that, he had the law repealed. After the law was repealed, talk radio took off and is now the number one radio format in the country. Interestingly, conservative talk radio has been successful while liberal talk radio has not. That has resulted in well over 90% of the talk shows being conservative shows. All of the most popular talk show hosts are conservative.

When the current administration and Congress was elected, there was a lot of talk about bringing the Fairness Doctrine back. That got shot down in quick order by the fans of talk radio. Since it is the number one listened to format in the country, there were a lot of calls and letters to Congressmen. In quick order, Congress responded with bills that said they would not put the Fairness Doctrine back in place. That should have ended it, but liberals do not give up easily when they almost have total control.

There is more than one way to get the Fairness Doctrine imposed, without actually imposing it. There is talk of having radio licenses being renewed every two years instead of every eight years. That would mean the liberals would have more chances to get the station to drop conservative talk radio. This might work, but would have to be put with some other method to have any real teeth.

The second way to bring the Fairness Doctrine back would be to have local Community Review Boards. These review boards would determine if a station has enough “local” programming. If this was paired with more frequent renewal of the license, it could have a big impact on whether a station could keep conservative talk radio.

A third way is being discussed. That is to require more minority ownership of radio stations. The thinking here is that minorities would be less likely to have conservative talk radio as their radio format of choice. That would then reduce the amount of conservative talk radio. Conservative talk radio is highly profitable for a radio station. Any station owner who wanted to make money would see quickly that it pays to have conservative talk radio on the air. This might work, but it would most likely have to be paired with something else to really work.

There are others. The problem is that if the liberals pull off the removal of conservative talk radio, there will be no place to get real news. All you will get are liberal talking points from liberal news outlets. The liberal news outlets get their news from the Democrat Party. All dissent would be stopped in the country and you would have a one party rule. We would be like the old Soviet Union with Pravda, only our news outlets would be voluntary arms of the government.

If the liberals get conservative talk radio, the internet is next. The internet would be much easier than talk radio. There will be no outcry, because there will be nobody to find out and report it. Even if someone did find out and report it, things take time on the internet. Things happen almost instantly on the radio. There would be no way to stop them.