An Upside to Mr Obama’s Healthcare Plan

So Mr Obama wants a national healthcare plan. The right opposes this and the left is doing it’s best to shut down debate and shunt discussion aside, because the objections are strong and many. However, the right might be using the wrong tactic. Perhaps the best tactic is to embrace the dark-side.

Mr Obama points out that with a National Healthcare plan that people like himself, i.e., the wealthy, would as he did for his grandmother still be able to pay for the care of their loved ones directly out of their pocket. Yet this is very problematic for his vision of nationalized healthcare. For it provides the essential loophole the rest of us need.

The rest of us, that is the normal working stiffs while on the first glance don’t have the wherewithall to have the ready cash to pay for emergency healthcare do in fact have the same. For, we are currently paying for all of our healthcare. The solution goes something like this:

1. An enterprising group of ordinary middle class people, who realize they can’t pay for emergency medical care which isn’t or is poorly covered by government coverage (or for example to skip to the head of the queue like the wealthy will be doing) will do what free people have done from the start. They’ll organize (an activity oddly enough Contitutionally protected).
2. By organizing in groups, collectively people can, uhm, spread their risk. Each will make monthly contributions to a collective pool, managed financially by a small number of administrators, who will figure costs, apportion and manage benefits, and invest funds. In fact there is a word for such organizations, they were formerly known and health care insurance companies. You might even find employers adding supplemental health care as a benefit to attract qualified, skilled, and attentive labor. I’d even go so far as to suggest that health care companies currently in place might jump at this market.
3. Mr Obama suggested that you can keep your current insurance. But this is not in fact what will occur. Your current insurance will magically transmute itself to be just supplemental insurance. If Mr Obama and the left decides this is dirty pool, it will become black market dirty pool, and I for one see know reasonable argument for why a person could not participate in such a market. If Mr Obama can use his ready cash … any schmoe should be able to join a risk pool to effectively do the same.
4. There is in fact a big fat plus to this plan. Supplemental insurance of this sort and in this market is completely (so far as I know) unregulated. It’s new unplowed ground. Unregulated health care markets are in fact exactly what Mr Obama thinks his plan is avoiding and also (not?) oddly enough exactly what I happen to think the health care market needs. Health care needs wild wooly unregulated markets to spur innovation. The unanticipated unregualted supplemental insurance market might provide at least a small sampling of this very thing.
5. Thus perhaps the best thing for the right to do is cede the healthcare proposal but fight for realistic cost controls and appraisals. That the taxes for this boondogle will not get out of hand, which will in turn cause the government insurance to cover and provide for in actuallity very little in the way of health care in the absence of supplemental income. This is actually what the right argues for, very minimal bare coverage for all and abillity to pay provides the caps on health care for the rest.

So the only stumbling block for this argument is one I don’t see as of yet. Is there any argument that would prevent supplemental insurance from springing up? Realistically I don’t see any difference between Mr Obama paying for his grandmother’s care and a group of people, in free association, collecting to provide the same and spreading the risk.