It's a Pig!

Today's summit is expected to be smelly. The Obama administration is trying to sell a health care program that Sarah Palin writes "you might call putting 'perfume on a pig'" and "doesn’t pass the smell test." A commercial that ran this morning refers to Obama's "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig" quote to describe the health care proposal. Newt Gingrich has been firing away with all barrels as well, and is holding a live blog on the summit today. The twittersphere is abuzz with all kinds of chatter, a lot of which is decrying the role of government in running health care. The obama administration may be thinking that the pig will be served better if cooked and served on a plate with nice garnishments. I'm sorry, Mr. President, no matter how you dress it up, it's still a pig. It's also a Rat Trap.

Until our body politic can get over the idea that the government can fix things by running them, regulating them or re-making them, we will never have the thing we love most in this country, no not health care, but a true free market. A true free market would allow insurance companies to sell insurance across state lines and allow more choices and more pooling options to buy insurance as well. The government's role should be that of referree, not player. It should get out of the way and get on our side, not take the whole thing over and run it worse than it's already being run now.

My Take On the Insurance Industry

If the liberals ever blew an opportunity to find bi-partisan agreement, the sweet spot if you will in negotiations, it's insurance reform, stupid. We all know how frustrating it is to deal with insurance companies and pay premiums that rise dramatically every year. The public option? Kill the insurance companies. If your child was misbehaving, would you kill them? No, you would modify their behavior. Some Republicans (well, 19 of them in the House) also don't get it. If you remove the exemption to anti-trust laws and allow insurance companies to compete across state lines, the free market will fix the problem. It worked for car insurance.

I'm not a big fan of insurance companies. But I am a big fan of capitalism. I'd rather see an insurance company go out of business because the free market punished their incompetency than to see an insurance company go out of business because of the public option. Let's get this thing right on philosophical grounds and the rest can be worked on later.

For example, how can we honestly say how many people are naturally priced out of the market due to poverty and / or lack of coverage through work, and how many people are artificially priced out of the market until we actually have a real market? Once we figure that out, then we can look at tax cuts, tax credits and other ways of covering the uninsured. There's no reason to mess up 300 million people if only 20 million really need the help.

Let's see what happens today. If the president still wants to try to put perfume on the pig, we're looking at more of a fight. If the president listens to the American people, gets rid of the pig and finds a much better animal to replace it, then we may be on the right track. I doubt he will do this though.

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Watch Hannity on Fox News Channel tonight 9 pm est. Sarah Palin will weigh in on the summit. Watch On the Record with Greta Van Susteren at 10 pm est. Newt Gingrich will weigh in on the summit. These two will probably give us the best insight into how it went today.

See Tammy Bruce's web page. The picture of the pig is great!