UAW Strike Fulfills Prophecy

I now stand before you a prophet in my own time. Or at least in my own mind.

As I informed you in my last post, I began predicting the disintegration of the current healthcare financing system ten years ago. The prediction was subsequently refined to indicate that the precipitating event would be a labor strike at a major national employer, which three years ago I determined would be General Motors.

So the UAW's strike fills my prophecy in full.

Even though union leaders say that the real reason for the strike is to get guaranteed job security, I think healthcare benefits must be part of this. After all, what comes along with job security? Healthcare benefits security.

Unfortunately, being proven a prophet has its downside. For the prophecy only begins with the strike against GM. What will follow is the complete unraveling of the current healthcare financing system and its ultimate replacement with something else. My powers of foresight have not yet revealed to me how long this process will take, or what we as a society will be left with at the end of the transformation.

I do know this: our American society now faces a choice of which direction to follow. And it is a choice. Do not let anyone tell you that it is not.

Will we choose to go down the easy path of government-controlled, government-regulated, and ultimately government-limited healthcare, where Big Brother tells you how much healthcare you can have, what kind it is, and how it will be done? Where (to horribly paraphrase Henry Ford) you can have any kind of healthcare you want as long as it's bleak? Where the government decides how much your healthcare is going to cost, and this amount will never cover the true cost, and the quality of healthcare progressively suffers as a result?

Or will we choose to go up the harder path of personal choice and personal responsibility, where you choose what healthcare you want, when you want it, and how much of it you want? Where the decisions about your healthcare are made between you and your doctor with no government bureaucrat standing behind you with a prior authorization denial slip? And where you, not the government or an insurance company, decide how much it's going to cost, and what the quality of that healthcare will be, because you, the actual consumer, are the one paying the bills?

Being able to see a train wreck coming and not being able to do anything to stop it is painful. That's where I've been for the last ten years. It's one of the reasons I started this blog. Before any solutions can be found there must be awareness of the real problems. And I will continue to carry my lamp, as feeble as it may be, to try to bring to light what I see as the nature of the real problems so that hopefully we may come to the right solutions.

America deserves a healthcare system of choice, options, dynamism, and innovation. It does not deserve a one-size-fits-no-one system of limits, rationing, stagnancy, and inhibition.

So my ranting will go on.