by John F. Di Leo
The federal government didn't nationalize two-thirds of the American auto industry overnight.
They did it slowly, ever so slowly, gradually chipping away at the foundation of the auto industry until one morning, we all woke up to find that the president had fired General Motors' CEO, had reorganized ownership in favor of the UAW and the government at the expense of the owners and creditors, and had arranged a sale of Chrysler to Fiat ("to Fiat?" we all stuttered, in amazement...from Mercedes to Fiat in just two years?).
It took decades to come to such a pass. For decades, threats of strikes and shortsighted management had resulted in overpromising to employees, burying the auto giants under an unsupportable burden of salaries, benefits, and (especially) pensions. Federal and state regulations have eroded their ability to make a profit, from CAFE standards designed to punish the manufacture of safe and popular vehicles while rewarding the manufacture of unsafe and unpopular ones, to the usual culprits of confiscatory federal, state, and local taxes.
The twenty-year effort to hypnotize the public into believing the false religion of Global Warming helped to make Big Auto -- especially Big American Auto -- both villain and poster child of all that is wrong with the world. And then came a perfect storm of high fuel prices, a credit crunch, and a recession to reduce auto-buying to a trickle.
A couple of bailouts later, and the government finally bought itself the legal standing to maneuver itself into total ownership and control of two of our three automakers (they said they didn't want control, but that didn't stop them from exercising it). Immediately, they started killing brands, closing factories, breaking up the wholes to sell the parts, terminating thousands of independent and successful dealerships just because they were in the way (or, sometimes, just because their owners donated to the wrong party or had a daughter who worked for the wrong network), even terminating their popular vehicles in favor of the unpopular ones. What the CAFE couldn't kill, this takeover could and did.
The Administration then surveyed their handywork and added to it a "Cash for Clunkers" program -- designed to identify hundreds of thousands of mean, nasty vehicles (chiefly American-made pickups, SUVs, old luxury cars, etc.) and pay short-sighted drivers to trade them in to be destroyed, in favor of a government check, a new car payment, and a new vehicle with better gas mileage, most likely one from Honda, Hyundai, or Toyota.
This "Cash for Clunkers" program was created and managed by the U.S. federal government -- the very owners of the American companies whose products they are calling "clunkers." Think about it: The owner of two of America's three auto companies just brilliantly engineered what Japan and South Korea have been unable to do for thirty years: to turn those particular hundreds of thousands of "American car buyers" into "foreign car buyers."
As owner of GM and Chrysler, what the Administration has just done with this program is totally against the interest of these two companies. If a privately held company were to do such a thing, it would be sued by its stockholders, and possibly the regulators as well, for the intentional destruction of its market. The government, however, is impervious to such moral qualms. They command the moral high ground; they do what they want.
And now the same people want to take over health care. But similarly, they haven't come to this point overnight.
For decades, both the federal and state governments have intruded in the marketplace. Governments have mandated extensive coverage, requiring that hospitals and their staffs risk bankrupting themselves rather than turning away nonpaying customers. Rather than allowing insurance companies to offer decent, basic insurance coverage, even basic coverage in state after state has had to include cover for plenty of things that the patient should pay for on his own, from birth control prescriptions to cosmetic surgery. How can we judge whether the free market will produce a fair and affordable pricing program, when the free market has never been allowed to operate at all? And still we have good medical care, even excellent, despite all these government-established roadblocks.
Governments have driven practitioners out of the business entirely, or wreaked havoc with their cost model, through a malpractice system that can honestly only be called insane. Medicare and Medicaid have systematically underpaid doctors and their hospitals so severely that these providers have had to make up for it by increasing the price they charge to nongovernment payers...
All this, with a clear end in mind: so that doctors and insurance companies get the blame for problem after problem caused entirely by government.
When a concerned populace raises these alerts today, warning of what lies ahead if government gets even more of a foothold in this market, the Administration says "No, you'll still be able to keep your doctor, your insurance plan, your hospital, if you're happy with them" (as, in fact, most of us are). We'd love to take them at their word, but what is their track record for trustworthiness on such matters?
For sixty years, the Democratic party has been rife with advocates of nationalized healthcare, from Teddy Kennedy on the Hill to the President himself (who didn't stop championing it in public until he was within sight of the Presidential nomination).
With the auto industry, they never even said they wanted to nationalize it... and yet, so they did, didn't they, within months of taking office. And we're supposed to believe this bunch could resist the opportunity to nationalize the healthcare sector -- a fifth of the U.S. economy -- if it's ever for one moment within their power to do so?
Consider: Everything they are now proposing is designed to make the current system worse, not better:
A greater role for government will cause prices to rise. It always does. So these greater costs will "necessitate" tax increases, in a futile attempt to provide the needed revenue. And these tax increases will drive manufacturing and other business out of the country to less-inhospitable shores, as they always do.
Taking decision-making ability away from insurance companies (who can be sued) and giving it to bureaucrats (who can't) will cause the wrong decisions to be made, and cause needed care to be denied.
As employers realize that paying the penalty to drive employees into the GovernmentCare is cheaper than funding ever-growing private insurance, they'll make the obvious choice, causing the currently-insured to join the uninsured and government-dependent at lightning speed. The exact opposite of Mr. Obama's promise, however sincere he sounds when he professes it.
As tax dollars are stretched beyond the ability to care for everyone, we will see "the moral high ground of the debate" quickly transform from saving lives to saving money -- from "Saving grandma" to "Saving us from grandma's costly care."
The advocates suspect they don't have much time for this window of opportunity. They know the odds are that they could lose one house of Congress next year, and probably the White House in 2012 as well. They rightly believe this is their best chance since the Depression, one that won't soon reappear. So they have filled their proposed bills with all the necessary tools it will take, to do as much damage to American healthcare in a year that it took fifty years to do to the auto industry.
Declare a crisis, overburden the system with debt, threaten it with outlandish lawsuits and crippling regulations. Bureaucratize it, so that you have no choice but to ration machines, equipment, and talent... to redistribute them geographically and by ethnicity and politics and need... Ensure an utterly unsupportable cost model so that it cannot help but collapse,
And the government will be there to "save the day" -- blaming doctors, insurance adjusters, and heartless businessmen -- ready to do everything but admit that it was their plan all along.
We must recognize these intents, both long term and short term, and stop them cold. Even the slightest compromise will enable the healthcare nationalizers to put us almost irrevocably on their road. It is too tempting for them, too irresistable -- the opportunity to control jobs, funds, people -- to regulate behavior, to literally decide who lives and who dies. We must defeat all their proposals, even the alleged compromises. Even another single step down this slippery slope could lead to a vertical drop.
Not every Democrat in Washington is an advocate of nationalized healthcare; those few so-called blue dogs who see some of its dangers are currently among America's most crucial guardians.
But the Administration and the Congressional leadership have been drinking this kool-aid ever since the Brits started the NHS across the pond, sixty years ago. And they're the ones in charge at both ends of the Hill, for the moment, with quite a margin on their side.
I'll tell you this much: If you hire a jewel thief to be your museum guard, because he respects the Hope Diamond a lot, and he professes to know better than anybody else how to keep it secure... I know what's going to be the first tidbit he "brings home from the office" -- and it won't be a pen.
copyright 2009 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and import/export compliance trainer. A former chairman of the Republican Party of Milwaukee County, he has now been a recovering politician for over twelve years and three months.
