There are so many things wrong with all this healthcare stuff, one hardly knows where to start. A good place might be to define some terms so that a common language and set of tools can be deployed in the discussion. This may seem fruitless as such terms are usually chucked out and replaced by political babble and catch phrases by people who are smart enough to know better, but are too morally adrift to resist the mass hysteria that inevitably comes from attempts to control other people’s lives. Make no mistake: The Affordable Care Act has nothing to do affordable care.

So, healthcare. Health and care. Take care of your health. There is a set of skill that an immature human being can learn from its parents, if it is careful to listen and not “dis” every notion of the previous generation. So healthcare is a personal responsibility, that you should have learned throughout childhood and adolescence. Wash your hands after you go the bathroom and before you eat. Exercise. Eat your vegetables. Don’t stay up too late. Lots of other rules, but you get it right? The things that our leaders are now making against the law because we would not listen to our mothers. Some people do not take personal responsibility for their health. That does not make it my responsibility.

Health insurance. Contrary to popular belief, health insurance is not a magic hall pass to the land of health and longevity. Health insurance is a contract. Under this contract, I pay some other people to protect my financial assets from devastation in case some disease befalls me and the cost of treatment exceeds my ability to pay. These other people agree to share in that risk with me, and they base the cost of that contract upon statistical and underwriting standards. I’ll pay the first thousand or five thousand dollars. Then we start splitting it up. I pay twenty percent, they pay eighty percent. Possessing a health insurance policy does not make me healthy. It makes me a responsible adult who understands the component parts of a financial plan. Obviously, these people who agree to share risk with me understand that the more I listened to and heeded my parents’ advice, the less of a risk I likely represent. Some people choose not to buy health insurance. This is not my problem. When they get sick, they can either pay for their care out of pocket (and why should that be illegal if someone can afford to do it?) or they can treat themselves at the drug store, or they can just live with the consequences of their actions or inactions. When it becomes mandatory to buy health insurance, all of the market factors that keep it affordable are eclipsed by government fiat. Care to guess where that will lead us?

Medical care, the biggest part of the whole debate and the one we hear the least about, is what I seek if, in spite of my best efforts in personal healthcare, I get sick. And by sick, I don’t mean a stomachache. Or sniffles. Or a headache. Or anything that is likely to go away in a couple of days if you give your body a chance to heal itself. So, I go to see a doctor and seek treatment. If an office visit, a prescription and maybe a follow-up can take care of it, great. I write the doctor a check for his services, go get my prescription filled and pay for it. Then I take special care to avoid whatever landed me with such malady in the first place. No insurance company or government agency need be involved. If it is something more than that, say appendicitis that requires surgery and recuperation, I contact my insurance company and begin the process of filing a claim, the mechanism by which I compel the insurance company to perform the contracted obligations.

Healthcare advocates (very few of which are medical professionals, but are rather involved in some financial aspect of the healthcare industry) are now suggesting that almost any symptom is probably an early sign of cancer and should be immediately and aggressively diagnosed and treated. Toe nail fungus may lead to heart disease. So don’t just go to a podiatrist and get your nails clipped, go instead to the cardiac center and get into a rehab program before the big one hits. If you have a headache, you should probably go and have a scan of some sort to rule out a brain tumor instead of taking a couple of aspirin. Anything, real or imagined could possibly be a sign of depression, tongue rot, lupus, fibro-hypo-tosis, mental illness, stroke, or tooth decay, and you probably need to be in a long term program in which you get dietary counseling, medication, and lots of pamphlets. Now they want to take these same behaviors, which have lead directly to healthcare costs spiraling out of control, and bring them to the millions of people who have thus far escaped their great deception.

Before you ask, the answer is no, I have not read the healthcare bill. There are several reasons for this. I know to well the environment in which this legislation was created. No good can come of this. Secondly, I reject the premise that healthcare reform is: a) necessary, and; b) the responsibility of the United States Government. As is almost always the case, when the government tries to solve a problem (which in this case it had to create and it did so effectively by hijacking the language, which I tried to clear up in the first few paragraphs) it almost always tries to fix the wrong thing, inevitably making things worse. Rather than forcing people to buy health insurance, which is not even health insurance anymore, why not create the environment in which people can succeed and prosper and grow. Then you will have a great many people demanding health insurance, driving the premium costs down. If you create a system of incentives and consequences people will figure it out. If you build a society that does not fear a set of human values (Honor your mother and father; Do not lie, kill and steal,) we may find ourselves a healthier, happier society spending much less on healthcare. My many liberal friends are rolling their eyes and tsk-tsking right now, but hey, why not try it? It just might work and won’t involve spending billions we don’t have on problems that can’t be clearly defined.